作者简介

Phil Jones is a researcher for the think tank Autonomy. He regularly writes for publications such as the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Statesman and Novara Media.

内容简介

The brutal truth behind our automated futures and the new world of work

We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a post-work utopia of ever expanding leisure. But behind the gleaming surface stands millions of workers, often in the Global South, manually processing data for a pittance.

Recent years have seen a boom in online crowdworking platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Clickworker, and these have become an increasingly important source of work for millions of people. And it is these badly paid tasks, not algorithms, that make our digital lives possible. Used to process data for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the new digital economy, although one hidden and rarely spoken of. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.


Phil Jones is a researcher for the think tank Autonomy. He regularly writes for publications such as the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Statesman and Novara Media.

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豆瓣评论

  • 苏诺
    三点五星,一本小书,总的来说还可以。Work without the worker指的是一种叫做microwork的形式,也有叫informal work或者gig economy的。全书的核心论点是智能科技并没有全方位地自动化人的工作,反而是将现有的许多工作“非正式化”了,切割成碎片的小块。例:图像识别算法的准确度是通过活人识别图像里的物体来改进的,而这些活人的工资是按件计算,工作也是非正式的;而一旦算法准确度提高,又会导致更多的人失去正式的稳定工作。整本书都是批判,批判这样的工作形式,批判导致它的背景和它可能导致的后果。本书也可以看作如何写学术批判文的范例。有趣的是书中无数次引用到Lilly Irani的那篇写Turkopticon的CHI文章,也是我们HCI领域的经典文章。02-06
  • 大象
    前四章的分析是有新的角度和启发的,但第五章和结论试图去给出反抗建议的时候,反而开始显得有些离地。01-24
  • 闻夕felicity
    ①对经济学和劳工研究门外汉读者非常友好:写作清晰、每段论述和分析都提供案例、脚注充分、语言平实准确、对跨学科和学派的概念有到位但不掉书袋的比较和解释;②前几章基本上能解释和分析清楚目前微工作者身处的困境、且可以作为类比非常有效地对日常工作者感受到的内卷压力和日益严苛的工作大环境进行解释,包括且不限于平台工作者被迫原子化、社交媒体KOL在成长期无偿劳动、数字标注作为垃圾工作的ZZ危害、女性主义者要求家务劳动工资化市场化时面对的第二重困境等等。结论给出的解决方案过于“并驾齐驱驶入美好夕阳”、毫无说服力——但这也不是作者的错,总不能真的说大家都没救了一起S吧。01-25

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