Labor & Work
AI and the future of work — displacement, augmentation, and power.
AI and the Gig Economy
The gig economy runs on a simple premise: connect workers with customers, take a cut, avoid being an employer. But this model only works at scale because of AI. Without [[algorithmic management|algorithmic systems]] to allocate work, set prices, evaluate performance, and discipline workers, platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart couldn't function.
AI Coding Assistants and the Future of Software Work
Software developers were supposed to be safe. While AI automated factory floors and call centers, writing code seemed too creative, too complex, too much like thinking. Then GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, and the profession that builds AI tools became one of the first to be reshaped by them.
AI and the Creative Industries: A Redistribution Case Study
If you want to understand how AI redistributes value, look at the creative industries. Not because artists are uniquely sympathetic — though they are — but because the mechanism is unusually visible. Human creators make work. AI companies scrape that work to train models. Those models generate competing output at near-zero marginal cost. The original creators lose income. The AI companies capture the surplus.
The Manager Is an Algorithm
Your boss might not be human anymore.
Collective Bargaining in the Age of AI
When AI enters the workplace, who decides how it's used? For most workers, the answer is simple: management decides, workers adapt or leave. But for unionized workers, a different path exists. Collective bargaining — the process by which workers negotiate with employers as a group — is becoming a critical mechanism for determining how AI's gains are distributed.
Content Moderation's Mental Health Crisis
Every AI platform you use has been made safer by someone else's suffering.
Data Labeling in the Global South
The AI industry runs on a workforce it would prefer you didn't think about.
Freelance Markets After Generative AI
The freelance economy was supposed to be the future of work. Platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com promised a global marketplace where talent met opportunity without gatekeepers. For millions of workers — from graphic designers in Manila to copywriters in Lahore to translators in Nairobi — these platforms delivered real income, real autonomy, and a plausible path to the middle class.
The RLHF Workforce: Who Trains the Trainers
When you ask an AI model a question and it gives you a clear, helpful, non-toxic answer, you're experiencing the product of human judgment — thousands of individual decisions made by workers you'll never see, working for wages you'd find hard to live on.
The Automation Debate
"Will AI take my job?" is the wrong question. The right questions: Which tasks? Which workers? Who captures the gains? And can policy change the outcome?
The Hidden Labor of AI
AI doesn't replace human labor. It obscures it.
The White-Collar Displacement Wave
For half a century, automation anxiety had a familiar shape. Factories closed. Assembly lines went dark. Workers in hard hats and steel-toed boots bore the brunt. The college-educated could watch this unfold with a mixture of sympathy and relief — sympathy for the displaced, relief that their own work seemed safe. Knowledge work, creative work, analytical work: these required a human mind. Machines couldn't touch them.