AI & Future of Work Expert Mary L. Gray Envisions the End of Ghost Work

“The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.”

― Mary L. Gray

For Americans, it’s been a year and a half of remote learning, remote gathering, and remote working. While in the last few months we’ve seen the slow return of in-person gathering, the effects of the pandemic are unlikely to vanish. It’s more probable that the precautions, lessons, and phenomena introduced or exacerbated during the pandemic will remain with us in the future. And perhaps, in many regards, that’s a good thing!

For example, as a nation and a global community in a pandemic, we witnessed firsthand the pressures experienced by stay-at-home guardians and single guardians who had to retain employment while managing children. So, educators and supervisors shifted assignment and project deadlines to accommodate. We witnessed the ongoing threat of police brutality against brown and black communities. So, city officials and CEOs invested hundreds of thousands of more dollars in marketing, outreach, rehiring, and philanthropy that disrupted the status quo and centered and protected black lives. We also witnessed the reshaping of American employment as more and more life moved online. Engineers largely reacted to this rapidly growing phenomenon by creating massive, work-for-hire platforms. While economists noted online platforms slowed horrific unemployment rates, they didn’t fully account for the ways in which the nature of online employment changed the workforce as we know it.

In Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, Outspoken Speaker and anthropologist Mary L. Gray, and her co-author Siddharth, unpack the way in which the current uptick in remote work, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence spawn and perpetuate ghost work. “Ghost work” describes work conditions where the value of a person’s contribution to a task or project is not simply devalued but literally erased from what we as end consumers experience. As more and more temporary contracts are listed on online platforms, more and more gig and ghost workers are hired to do knowledge-based project work that often offers low pay, convoluted hiring processes, and minimal-to-no worker benefits. Labor laws, which included organized labor advocacy for good work conditions, were birthed out of the 1930 and 1940s factory work eras. Nearly a century later, in a world where factory hands are largely obsolete and have been replaced by AI, Gray understands how vital it is that we revisit and modify labor laws for our current age and consider the human lives that are impacted by our growing everyday technologies. In Gray’s TED talk entitled, “COVID-19 unraveled the workforce. Here’s how we fix it,” she implores business owners to adopt more empathetic policies that extend essential benefits to all workers, for the sake of the future of our swelling digital economy and the wellness of all people.

Mary L. Gray is available to book for virtual and in-person events and workshops. For more information, click here.
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