[Video] When Robots Don’t Show Up: Antonio Casilli Webinar at ETUI

When Robots Don’t Show Up. Organizing the real workforce behind automation is the title of the webinar that DiPLab’s Antonio Casilli gave at ETUI (European Trade Union Institute) on April 16, 2025. Part of the AI Talks series, the webinar was an online conversation with Aida Ponce Del Castillo, Senior researcher @ ETUI

Antonio A. Casilli’s new book “Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation” (University of Chicago Press, 2025) exposes how automated technologies depend on vast networks of outsourced and invisibilized human labor. In his research, he documents how platform workers, micro-taskers, and everyday users provide the essential input that makes AI systems function. Casilli argues that automation narratives serve to fragment and devalue labor while obscuring human contribution. Featured in Science, MIT Technology Review, and selected as a Top Science Pick by the journal Nature, his work offers union organizers practical approaches to identifying and mobilizing the dispersed workforce behind digital platforms and AI systems. This presentation will address urgent questions about worker rights, working conditions, and collective action in a future where robots perpetually fail to arrive.