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Ghost Work
Book

Ghost Work

How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass

Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019

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Researchers Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri detail an invisible segment of the labor market: people who perform “ghost work” or “on-demand” labor in the technology industry that algorithms and AI alone can’t do. The authors reveal the flaws in how society undervalues gig work and part-time jobs. They draw a historical line from marginalized workers doing piecework in sweatshops to today’s gig workers, an important analogy since on-demand work is likely the future of employment. Gray and Suri advocate legal and societal changes to make gig work viable for workers and businesses.

Take-Aways

  • Behind the seamless performance of software applications lurks an invisible army of people doing “ghost work.”
  • Ghost work is the latest incarnation of part-time, marginalized, devalued labor.
  • “Algorithmic cruelty” is a cost burden that people who do ghost work pay in the on-demand marketplace.

About the Authors

Mary L. Gray is a senior principal researcher at Microsoft, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and a faculty member at Indiana University’s School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. Senior principal researcher Siddharth Suri was a founding member of Microsoft Research, New York City, before joining the Human-Centered AI group in Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington.

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