CHI 2019 paper “Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care”

Dorothy Howard and I co-authored a paper on the politics of qualitative research as a practice of extracting knowledge or practicing solidarity. The paper won an honorable mention at CHI 2019.

Title: Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care (escholarship open access)

Abstract: This paper investigates a hidden dimension of research with real world stakes: research subjects who care — sometimes deeply — about the topic of the research in which they participate. They manifest this care, we show, by managing how they are represented in the research process, by exercising politics in shaping knowledge production, and sometimes in experiencing trauma in the process. We draw first-hand reflections on participation in diversity research on Wikipedia, transforming participants from objects of study to active negotiators of research process. We depict how care, vulnerability, harm, and emotions shape ethnographic and qualitative data. We argue that, especially in reflexive cultures, research subjects are active agents with agendas, accountabilities, and political projects of their own. We propose ethics of care and collaboration to open up new possibilities for knowledge production and socio-technical intervention in HCI.

Chasing Innovation, the book, is out! Interview with Chris Kelty on CAMP

My book Chasing Innovation is out with Princeton University Press. You can also access the penultimate proof as a PDF over at escholarship. The book will be released in a South Asia edition distributed through Penguin Random House (date TBA).

Chris Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Open Source, interviewed me about the book over at the CAMP (Communication, Media and Performance) Anthropology blog. We talk about collective forms in tech production and how they are tied to the state, capital, development, and utopia.

Hype, Profit, Labor and Agency: What’s at Stake in the 4th Industrial Revolution?

STS scholars Lee Vinsel and Patrick McCrary organized a workshop to explore and critically examining the idea of the 4th Industrial Revolution. As part of a collection of essays coming out of the workshop, I’ve published “Hype, Profit, Labor, and Agency” .

“The hype of inevitable AI and total automation immobilizes AMT workers from demanding better wages or improvement to their work conditions. Like the threat of workers made available cheaply in other parts of the world, public assumptions about AI and automation immobilize grassroots, democratic participation in shaping the future of work. This hype and the broader narratives of novelty and disjuncture that often accompanies it can prematurely disarm existing ethical and justice frameworks by which citizens can make claims about technological futures.”

Anthropod Podcast on entrepreneurialism, human computation workers, and design

Tariq Ghani and Katherine Sacco of UCI Anthropology interviewed me for the American Anthropological Association’s podcast Anthropod. On the 25 minute interview podcast: “Lilly Irani discusses the human labor behind artificial intelligence technology. Irani helped create a platform called Turkopticon to support workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a website that outsources micro data processing work. Irani also talks about her current book project on entrepreneurialism and national development in India.”

In 2017, I spoke at the conference of the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design on Turkopticon and the politics of writing labor as an ethnographer. Ghani and Sacco interviewed as part of a 3 part series on the intersections between ethnography and design.

Pew Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age

In addition to saving lives and conquering chaos, algorithms “can also put too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity and serendipity, and could result in greater unemployment,” finds a Pew report surveying experts. I was one of the experts surveyed and quoted. Download the full report here

 

White House / NYU AINow Summit talk: “The Labor that Makes AI Magic”

I was invited to give a lightning talk on my research at a White House Office of Technology Policy summit on AI: Social and Economic Impacts in the Near Term. I gave this five minute talk distilling key parts of my research that challenge some dominant assumptions by economists and policy makers — particularly The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. People have told me that the talk was helpful to them and pushed points they had missed in my work before, so I’m reposting it here despite hating the video thumbnail facial expression!

Antonio Cassilli drew out these points in a recent post:

1) “Automation doesn’t replace labor, it displaces it”: computers learns to recognize texts, images, sounds via human computation workers who fuel AI by performing micro-paid & unpaid ‪#‎digitallabor‬ on platforms like Amazon MTurk (and many more). These workers “bridge the gap between AI and changing human culture”.
2) Micro-workers face a race to the bottom in an ever-expanding, largely unregulated labor market. (Personal addendum: We cannot think AI regulatory policies without also thinking about regulating these labor markets. So next time someone asks you “what should the government do to regulate artificial intelligence to keep it ethical?”, you might wanna answer: “Let’s talk about working conditions, modes of remuneration, health care of people that do AI”.)

New article in STHV: “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepeneurial Citizenship”

This piece, “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship,” comes from my ethnographic work on design as nation building in India. It will appear in a special issue on the politics of hacking edited by Johann Soderberg and Alessandro Delfanti in Science, Technology & Human Values.

From the abstract: “Hackathons sometimes produce technologies, and they always, however, produce subjects. This article argues that the hackathon rehearses an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change. Such optimistic, high-velocity practice aligns, in India, with middle-class politics that favor quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators over the contestations of mass democracy or the slow construction of coalition across difference. “

Honorable Mention at CHI 2015: Social software to help crowdworkers organize

Our paper “We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers” has been accepted for publication and awarded an honorable mention at CHI 2015. The paper comes out of a collaboration with professional Mechanical Turk workers (including co-authors Kristy Milland and Clickhappier) and Computer Scientists at Stanford. We built a system, We Are Dynamo, to create a protected space for online crowdworkers to propose and debate organizing tactics for activism. The intervention is both technical configuration and an attempt to change discourse about Turkers and their futures.

The system and the campaigns it supported seem to have done so, gaining coverage in both international news media and the tech press: Intellectual Piecework (Chronicle of Higher Education), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers protest: ‘I am a human being, not an algorithm’ (The Guardian), Amazon’s Turkers Kick Off the First Crowdsourced Labor Guild (The Daily Beast), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers want to be treated like humans (Engadget).