MIT Technology Review has highlighted Antonio Casilli’s Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation as one of the essential reads examining our complex relationship with AI and automation technologies. In his review, contributor Bryan Gardiner praises the award-winning book published by University of Chicago Press, placing it among the most insightful works that explore humanity’s nuanced and often tense interactions with robotics and artificial intelligence systems. Casilli, a co-founder of the interdisciplinary group DiPLab, offers a compelling examination of automation’s hidden human workforce—revealing how many supposedly AI-powered systems actually rely on armies of invisible laborers performing digital piecework around the globe. The book’s inclusion in this roundup signals growing mainstream recognition of critical perspectives that look beyond the technological hype to examine the real social and economic impacts of our increasingly automated world. > “Forget about losing jobs to automation. Remarkably, the reality is that > humans steal the jobs of robots.” > The Voder may have been one of the first crude attempts at speech synthesis, > but the disconnect between the way it worked (with a lot of human training and > labor) and the way the public and press perceived it (as a more or less > autonomous machine with its own voice) foreshadowed a problem we still face > today. In Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, Antonio A. > Casilli argues that despite claims to the contrary, human input remains a > crucial component of all modern automation and artificial-intelligence tools, > regardless of their sophistication. The difference is that instead of this > role being obvious—as was the case with the Voderettes—it’s now hidden, and > usually on purpose. Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation Antonio A. Casilli > Casilli is a sociology professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris who > studies the unseen and unacknowledged “digital labor” that undergirds many of > today’s social media platforms, microtask sites, and on-demand services. > Rather than viewing automation and AI as destroyers of human jobs, he makes a > convincing case that they merely result in the further atomization of work, > fracturing it into smaller, more meaningless, more demeaning tasks for many of > us. “Forget about losing jobs to automation,” he writes. “Remarkably, the > reality is that humans steal the jobs of robots.” > Whether it’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a service for recruiting hundreds of > thousands of micro-taskers to perform video-filtering and image-tagging tasks > that machines can’t do, or the perpetual human “supervision” and > “reinforcement” required for automated learning and AI training, Casilli gives > readers plenty of examples of how human labor (much of it coming from Asian, > Latin American, and African countries) props up—or, in some cases, pretends to > actually be—intelligent systems and products. > > Ultimately, Casilli is less concerned that robots will replace white-collar > workers, and more worried that thousands of lower-paid or unpaid digital > workers will. As he points out, we are already unwittingly being recruited by > companies to collectively perform millions of hours of free work every year. > Take the aforementioned captchas: Google, which owns and deploys one of the > most popular versions of the service (ReCAPTCHA and No CAPTCHA), has been > using this digital labor for more than a decade. The results help detect house > numbers to improve Google Street View, digitize texts for Google Books, and > train its computer vision algorithms to detect locations and reconstruct > scenes, enhancing Google Images and improving the performance of Waymo’s > self-driving cars. “The irony here is that a service that is supposed to > distinguish humans from robots is actually making humans work to produce more > robots,” Casilli writes. > > While all the hype and hyperbole surrounding today’s AI tools can feel > unprecedented, Casilli reminds readers that such rhetoric isn’t really new at > all. Robots, automation, and various intelligent systems have been just on the > verge of taking over all aspects of our work lives and cultural output for > decades now. In the end, artificial intelligence is a technological process > that isn’t actually artificial, he says. Peer behind the curtains of smooth > and seamless efficiency, and it’s humans all the way down.

During a book talk at the University of Harvard, Antonio Casilli, DiPLab’s co-founder and author of the new book Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, draws on his fieldwork across South America, Africa, and Europe to examine how AI companies serve as modern gatekeepers of global labor migration. In this conversation with Dr. Moira Weigel, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center, Casilli argues that tech companies extract labor from low-income countries while ensuring workers remain physically separated from the wealthy nations they serve. Casilli examines the rise of multilingual data work platforms and the erosion of employment standards, unpacking AI’s labor force and its impact on global inequality.

Sociologist Antonio Casilli joins Monday Buzz’s host Brian Standing on WORT 89.9 Community Radio, Madison, WI for an interview about his book Waiting for Robots. The Hired Hands of Automation. > A recent financial advice column on MSN from The Motley Fool, included the > following breathless assessment of the future of artificial intelligence: > “With AI, software and systems are being empowered to reason, act and evolve, > all without the need for human intervention.”  A CNN report from 2024 claimed > that “AI is Replacing Human Tasks Faster Than You Think.”  Ever since the era > of John Henry and the steam driver, industrialists have crowed about machines > replacing human labor, opening up a future of leisure and prosperity.  But > workers feel more exploited than ever.  Why does that day seem always to be > some time in the future?  Just how autonomous are artificial intelligences any > way?  These questions are the focus of the book “Waiting for Robots” by > Antonio Casilli, now out in English translation from the University of Chicago > Press.