Descrizione del progetto
Uno sguardo più attento ai lavoratori umani dietro all’intelligenza artificiale
Al giorno d’oggi, l’intelligenza artificiale richiede sempre più spesso un sostegno umano a basso livello tecnologico per attività come la programmazione, la verifica e la pulizia dei software. I cosiddetti lavoratori fantasma svolgono questi compiti a breve termine su richiesta, anonimamente, tramite piattaforme automatiche e senza alcun feedback da colleghi o superiori. Nonostante tale particolare fenomeno sia in crescita, l’influenza di quest’occupazione sul benessere lavorativo resta poco studiata. Per affrontare questo divario che richiede urgente attenzione, il progetto GHOSTWORK, finanziato dall’UE, svolgerà uno studio approfondito sulle condizioni lavorative dei lavoratori fantasma e su come influiscano sul loro benessere generale. Il progetto svilupperà un nuovo approccio multi-metodologico, creando un quadro integrato che incorpori modelli, teoria e risultati empirici.
Obiettivo
Artificial intelligence depends on human labour to conduct tasks such as data cleaning, coding, and classifying content. This on-demand work is offered and performed online, paid by the task, on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Conceptualized as ‘ghost work’, this rapidly growing, platform-based work is largely unseen: workers are unable to speak with managers, do not get feedback, and lack labour protections. How do these specific work conditions influence ghost workers’ well-being? To ensure decent work conditions as automation continues to expand, knowledge about the effects of ghost work on well-being is urgently needed.
The proposed project will develop and test an integrative framework for analysing the effects of ghost work on worker’s well-being. Existing models for analysing the impact of work conditions on well-being fall short for studying ghost work, as these models assume a person has a job and most likely an employer and colleagues. Therefore, this project begins from the specificities of ghost work to synthesize theories and concepts about algorithmic control, occupational well-being, human computation, and platform labour, in order to understand how and through which mechanisms ghost work influences well-being.
The project will contribute to and advance cross-disciplinary scholarship on platform labour and organizational studies of algorithmic technologies. Using a multi-methodological approach to study the effects of ghost work, it begins with in-depth interview-based fieldwork on ghostworkers’ work conditions, and then entails qualitative diary studies of the short-term dynamics of ghost work for worker’s work conditions and well-being. Finally, a 4-wave longitudinal panel study will investigate the relationship between ghost work and well-being over time. Scholars in multiple fields, as well as policy makers and industry leaders, will be keenly interested in both the resulting integrative framework and empirical findings.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
3062 PA Rotterdam
Paesi Bassi