Future Scenario: Data Labour

In this next leap to year 2030, Amtis lives the life of a data labourer, being paid wages for data inputs. Here’s how Amtis begins the story:

I am in my green pyjamas, but I can’t say for sure if it’s morning or evening. My eyes are red from staring at screens. I am discouraged and very tired. Of course, all these emotions and reactions are registered by my Playbour – my pocket-sized smart console that has basically become my entire life. It’s my connection to family, friends and the world; my health and mood monitor; my life organiser and personal assistant and basically how I earn my living. It’s my Play and it’s my Labour.

These days, fewer and fewer people go to work in an actual office. Everything happens through this device, which captures the data I generate on different platforms and pays me for all these data inputs. But in reality, everything goes to one single company, as most of the other platforms are its partners or affiliates.

Shit money, literally

Last month I enabled the 'health' add-on on my console, so now it's counting how frequently I go to the toilet and it connects to the sensors in the toilet to collect data about my pee and my poop. This data is sent to pharmaceutical companies so they can make better drugs. Maybe I’ll help cure the world from urinary infections, prostate disorders, digestion problems and haemorrhoids. Every now and then I’m tempted to make a bad joke about shit money, but health data pays better than most other types, so I’ll shut up.

You know what else pays well? My 'entertainment' data. I get bonuses for more juicy data such as my heart rate, eyeball movement and amount of perspiration when I watch movies, listen to an audiobook, play games or read articles. Data associated with political media pay even better. After I learned that trick, my behaviour changed a lot. I am watching all the movies recommended in my Playbour, I am frenetically consuming clickbait articles, and trying to produce as much health-related data as possible. My life and actions are all about how well they pay.

One time I even took laxatives to get more 'results'. I was happy to see that I could trick the system, but after a few times I guess the algorithm detected a pattern and penalised me. It not only fined my account, but it also placed a ban in pharmacies so that I can’t buy laxatives. Now, if I really have a digestion problem, I am screwed!

Training the AI overlord

Not many people know what all this is for. Everything that gets captured by this device is meant to train the world’s most powerful AI system. Human input is used to teach this machine all we know, to help it evolve. The master plan is to transform it into an eternal collective extension of our humanity and train it to make better decisions for us. We’re already putting it in charge of our daily, routine decisions. More and more decisions from politicians and our government rely on this supermachine. Would the next step be to give it full control?

We’re giving away our ability to decide for ourselves and we are trusting the machine to govern our world. We are enslaving ourselves in order to feed it data, because that’s the best way to get paid these days. As people used to say: "Better to be exploited in a capitalist society than unemployed and destitute".

Both user and worker

People asked for data markets, so the data I contribute is now paid for as labour. I have full work documentation registered with the Playbour from the moment my first bit of data reached them. The interface of my console shows me how many tasks I have performed, the price that was paid for each, how many days off I am entitled to (calculated based on how hard-working I was) and what contributions go to my pension plan. It’s funny that I am a user of these platforms, but I am also their worker.

The Taskometer is the employer’s new evaluation metric

Every time a company needs something, there is a federated AI Manager that splits the task into smaller chunks and sends alerts to workers to complete it. You have to be very fast when this happens, to make sure you get the task - just like you did a decade ago with 'crowdsourcing markets'. More advanced versions of the Playbour have an AI that selects the jobs for you, instead of you doing this manually. But this version of the console is more expensive. I am saving up to buy one later. The thing is, if you don’t complete 100,000 micro tasks per month, you don’t get paid at minimum wage level per task. The system works like this: you get paid by the task, but the price varies depending on the total amount of tasks you complete. And there are certain thresholds, and some evaluation criteria such as the quality of data. So you can’t be sloppy. If you’re below 100,000 in your Taskometer, the price per task is so small that you can barely keep your head up. But hey, now we can no longer say there is fake unemployment. The Taskometer certifies my labour and evaluates my work.

Data labour unions 

I tried to speak with some of the union leaders about raising those thresholds. We're counting on them to represent us and protect our labour rights, but data labour unions are still quite young and weak. There aren't many young labourers like me joining unions, many people associate them with the 'old way' of doing things and don't see any value in joining. All this time, unions have struggled to maintain relevance and to adapt to the digital space. But they didn't hold ground, so I am not sure if they can manage to put that much pressure after all.

Nobody escapes data exploitation

You might think that wealthier people got away in the data labour system. Actually, it’s more nuanced than that. It’s true that they could stay out of data labour and not hook their lives to a Playbour device - but they could not get away from sensors and tracking. The rich started building walled cities where nobody else could afford to live. The cities were sealed so that nobody outside their select group could come in. They used heavy surveillance infrastructure to achieve this. A truly smart city, some would say. And all the data produced by their houses, by their devices, by the sensors in their citadel, was captured by the AI overlord. They were as much trapped in the same AI ecosystem as everybody else, but they had the illusion of privacy and protection from the plebes.

Privacy for pennies

The 'data sharing economy' and automated services have displaced countless jobs. Most people now sell every bit of their data for a few pennies each. We can now see the true face of this economy based on 'sharing'.

Here’s what I make out of this story on a more objective and critical level. If you want to jump straight to Scenario 3 click here.

Reflections on Scenario 2

It seems like monopolies cannot be combated through a data labour system. Monopolies don’t simply disappear, even if they start paying people wages - they adapt and persist. A market for data is complicated to achieve in practical terms, but there are other reasons why this model may not be what we are looking for.

A data labour system runs on people fuelling it with data from all possible sources. This deepens the gap between the poor and the rich and it encourages inequality. While the rich can afford not to sell their data, the rest will be vulnerable, exposed and would give in more quickly to exploitative systems. This looks much more like digital feudalism than individual empowerment.

But the discussion goes beyond inequality. In a future where data labour is used to feed and train AI services in all aspects of our lives – from decisions about how we govern ourselves, to our legal system, education and immigration – nobody will win in the long run.

And who knows, maybe in the near future machines will learn from each other and there will not be the need for people to train and feed them data. Machine to machine learning might replace the human input AI services rely on, but today, as a Google employee puts it, “Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it’s human beings that are doing the work.”

More tracking means more money

It’s true that data labour might be able to solve the problem of indirect data (e.g., data about you that you don’t know is extracted). But I am not sure this is the solution we are looking for. As all human actions, emotions and by-products could be monetised or labelled as labour, there was no more need for people to ask for transparency. In Amtis’ story, people already knew that tracking and sensitive information would bring them more money. There are no more abuses and exploitative practices because we put a price tag on them and thus we acknowledged them provided them with legitimacy.

In the long run, platforms crave quality data

The future will indisputably bring more AI services. To build better AI services, you not only need more data, but you also need data of a certain quality. It’s safe to assume that most workers who participate in a data labour system will be from marginalized, disadvantaged or poor communities. They could generally provide ordinary data, but from a certain point onwards this will not be enough. There will be certain types of data labour tasks that require specific skill sets, which won’t be easy for just anybody to perform. In other words, more educated workers could contribute to a bigger number of tasks, while less knowledgeable workers could pick from only a limited number of assignments. And this will create discrepancies and inequality.

Privacy is a time-shifted risk

Needless to add here, information that I am okay with sharing (or selling) today might get me in serious trouble tomorrow. Change of political regimes is probably the most obvious example. Remember in our not-so-distant history how totalitarian regimes asked you to declare your religion in official documents and then used this information to persecute? Or say you take a DNA test with a company. The police is already using DNA testing companies to find suspects.

Human beings instead of human doings

In the end, do we really want to monetize all aspects of our lives? Will this bring us well-being and social self-determination? Do we want to define ourselves by our data (generated for others) or by who we are? And more importantly, how can we make things better if everybody will still be looking for more financial gain? If we want to set ourselves up for a better future, we should probably look for ways to reduce wide-spread monetisation of our lives.