Work and labor have become increasingly complex to grasp within contemporary capitalism. While labor power has always been sold under different legal, spatial and class-based conditions, the forms and dynamics of these categories have been extended and multiplied. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson introduce the concept of multiplication of labor as a perspective to assess these new forms of labor; they understand multiplication of labor as a conceptual tool to investigate what they call the intensification, diversification and heterogenization of labor. This paper applies the concept to Mechanical Turk, an online platform for crowdsourced microwork. It argues that the platform intensifies the labor process through various mechanisms of 'Digital Taylorism', diversifies labor as it develops new kinds of work and production open to a multitude of workers; and it heterogenizes labor as it functions in an informal manner, circumventing basic labor rights.

In this research, we analyzed the relationship between women and Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) – a platform where people work remotely performing Human Intelligent Tasks. HITs are small and important tasks responsible for making Artificial Intelligence feasible, such as labeling data. In this paper we discuss how AI automation is, in fact, an opaque architecture (Pasquinelli and Joler 2020) that perpetuates gender issues in digital work.

Personal AI assistants are now nearly ubiquitous. Every leading smartphone operating system comes with a personal AI assistant that promises to help you with basic cognitive tasks: searching, planning, messaging, scheduling and so on. Usage of such devices is effectively a form of algorithmic outsourcing: getting a smart algorithm to do something on your behalf. Many have expressed concerns about this algorithmic outsourcing. They claim that it is dehumanising, leads to cognitive degeneration, and robs us of our freedom and autonomy. Some people have a more subtle view, arguing that it is problematic in those cases where its use may degrade important interpersonal virtues. In this article, I assess these objections to the use of AI assistants. I will argue that the ethics of their use is complex. There are no quick fixes or knockdown objections to the practice, but there are some legitimate concerns. By carefully analysing and evaluating the objections that have been lodged to date, we can begin to articulate an ethics of personal AI use that navigates those concerns. In the process, we can locate some paradoxes in our thinking about outsourcing and technological dependence, and we can think more clearly about what it means to live a good life in the age of smart machines.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the micro-work of Brazilians on global artificial intelligence platforms. In context of platformisation of labour, we show that artificial intelligence still requires a lot of human work, leading to global value chains and a global gig economy. In a digital economy, there are inequalities involving local workers and global platforms. At present, however, most research on micro-work focuses on the Global North. Latin America remains a blindspot. This research investigates the micro-work of Brazilians on two specific platforms, Appen and Lionbridge. This research reveal that micro-work is closely intertwined with the historical informality of labour in the country, a gig economy that existed prior to digital labor itself. There is no ‘digital labour universalism’. Rather, there is an AI colonialism reinforcing North–South inequalities from a platform labour perspective.

Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market created by Amazon, has recently become popular among social scientists as a source of survey and experimental data. The workers who populate this market have been assessed on dimensions that are universally relevant to understanding whether, why, and when they should be recruited as research participants. We discuss the characteristics of MTurk as a participant pool for psychology and other social sciences, highlighting the traits of the MTurk samples, why people become MTurk workers and research participants, and how data quality on MTurk compares to that from other pools and depends on controllable and uncontrollable factors.

Consideration of the intersection of human and technology issues and the influences of each of these is the key issue discussed in this paper. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have provided many situations to contemplate with the numerous impacts on society both positive and negative. These new and innovative functions will bring with them additional questions and many overt and covert ethical considerations. Along with the rise of big data, many believe that we have exceeded our worst fears about giving over control and manipulation of our private information. This leads us to the question whether technologies are empowering us or subjecting us. Technologies are becoming more and more capable of performing tasks previously assigned to humans. In many cases, this is a good thing to eliminate routine human tasks. Even in the preliminary phases of understanding AI, there is an infinite amount of questions and concerns. With these concerns, it is imperative that we consider al...