We, the Data Workers: Challenging the future of labour

Manuel Beltrán We are being replaced by machines. What happened to
horses after the invention of the steam engine, is now happening to
us. Soon our manual labour will no longer be needed and with the
advance of artificial intelligence, intellectual labour will be
replaced by machines as well. The IoHO explores this scenario and
tries to ask questions on how to re-position the role of humans by
developing new relationships between human and machine and new
dynamics of creation of value in a post-work scenario. In the
installation of Biological Labour (2015) we hire human workers to
wear a body suit that harvests their residual body heat to produce
electricity that then is fed into a microcomputer producing
cryptocurrency. With this new form of work we aim at questioning
the possible consequences of the combination of invasive
technologies with the lack of jobs to be performed by humans. After
our first exploration extracting value from the human body, we are
now researching a new path towards understanding the production of
data as a form of labour: Human-generated data is a resource
already extracted by companies like Google and Facebook producing
vast amounts of capital. Why aren’t we, the data-workers,
capitalizing from it? In Data Production Labour (2017) we
problematize our relationship with companies like Facebook and
their exploitation of invisible labour deriving from our production
of data. Through this process we explore different proposals, such
as the Data Basic Income on which we ask the question: What does it
mean to be unemployed while producing data for companies and
therefore producing monetary value, shouldn't we receive a payment
for this invisible labour? Currently we are working on establishing
the Data Workers Union, a platform which enables citizens to gain
agency and advocate for their data labour rights.
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