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.