In an article entitled “Doit-on avoir peur de la super IA?”, journalist Joffrey Vovos looks back at two different coordinated “attacks” carried out by two AI agents from OpenAI. While they were being tested in a normally confined environment, the two agents hacked into the server of Hugging Face, a machine learning community platform. At the same time, a number of tech engineers and major figures in the AI field, such as Jacob Coxon, have been voicing their concerns about the development of AI and the future of humanity. In this article, the journalist interviews different researchers from different fields. Among them, Paola Tubaro argues that these theatrical communications coming from AI developers are merely “a communication tool”, allowing them to attract major investments and cash flows and prepare for a stock market listing. The “incidents” that happened this summer could also simply be a way for developers to showcase the power of their AI models and promote them to investors. “To mention far-future risks is also a way of hiding the problems that these technologies are already creating: the huge environmental toll of data centers, the consequences of the bursting of a speculative bubble, and the impact on the job market and everyday life.” explains Paola Tubaro. You can read the article here

The 9th edition of INDL (International Network on Digital Labour) was held in Geneva, at the International Labour Organization (ILO), from 9 to 11 September. Bringing together almost 120 presenters across 35 sessions, the conference provided three days of discussion and exchange around current research on data and platforms work. The ILO was a particularly fitting setting for the conference, having just adopted, in June 2026, the Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy (No. 193), the first international labour standard specifically dedicated to workers in the platform economy. Data labour was explored through a wide range of perspectives, across eight topics, including Gender and Digital Labour, New Frameworks for a “Human-Centric” AI Supply Chain, and The Role of Social Dialogue in Governing AI-Mediated Work. Some of these presentations were given by DipLab members. Paola Tubaro presented her article, Not all equal: A multidimensional vulnerability indicator for platform data workers, which explores data workers and their relationship to data work through the lens of vulnerability. She also closed the conference with an engaging roundtable, chaired by Uma Rani and joined by Timothy Newman and Alex Taylor. The discussion focused on Setting up an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda on AI Supply Chains. On the second day of the conference, Antonio Casilli presented his article Deep Labor: Beyond the Platform/BPO Divide in Data Work. The paper challenges the distinction between platform work and BPO work, proposing instead to examine both through the broader lens of data work, or “deep labor”. Mathilde Abel presented the paper Extracting Workers’ Cognition: An NLP Approach to AI Annotation Guidelines, co-written with Thomas Le Bonniec, who also presented One Arm of the Assembly Line of AI: EU Data Workers and Privacy Regulation. The first paper explores how AI annotation work requires workers to combine cognitive skills, such as interpreting and evaluating content, with the ability to adapt to specific client requirements. The second paper examines how EU data workers’ personal data is collected and exploited by AI companies, arguing that giving workers greater control over their own data could also strengthen data protection for the wider public. Other DipLab-associated members also presented their work. Matheus Viana Braz presented Psychosocial and Health-Related Risks in AI Value Chains: The Case of Latin American Data Workers, which explores burnout risks among Latin American data workers, highlighting how high work demands, income insecurity, algorithmic surveillance, and limited autonomy can contribute to psychological exhaustion and disengagement. He also presented another paper, Digital Autoethnography and the Affective Economy of Data Work in the Global South, in which he draws on nine months of personal experience working on microtask platforms to examine how data work affects workers’ mental health and emotional well-being. Lucas Santos presented an article entitled Regulating Platform Labour in Brazil: Precarity, Contestation, and Workers’ Agency, exploring the debate surrounding the regulation of platform-mediated work in Brazil. Myriam Raymond presented her article From Atomized Workers to Digital Solidarities: Everyday Resistance among Egyptian Data Workers, which examines how Egyptian data workers use Facebook groups to share information, support one another, and develop collective forms of resistance against precarious working conditions and platform control. One of the keynotes was delivered by Julian Posada, a DiPLab-associated researcher, under the title [Data Work and Territory: The Latin American Experience]. Drawing on his new book, Platform Extractivism, he examined the reality of data work in Latin America, with a particular focus on Venezuela. His keynote explored the political-economic factors that have shaped Venezuela’s position within global AI supply chains, highlighting how data work is deeply embedded in broader economic and territorial relations. But the conference was also marked by several important announcements. One of the most significant was the formal notification of Teleperformance regarding the protection of Kenyan data workers. On the final day of the conference, the first South Asian chapter of the International Network on Digital Labour (INDL) was also announced. The workshop will take place in Pondicherry from February 1 to 5, 2027. Finally, it was announced that the next edition of INDL, INDL-10, will take place in São Paulo.

Paola Tubaro was invited to give a talk at the ASOR Institute in Santiago in early July, and shared some results of her research in order to deepen dialogue on these important topics. She discussed how algorithmic management comes with a promise of higher productivity, but also increases surveillance in companies, while the apparent autonomy of self-employed workers on platforms—from Rappi delivery drivers to Workana designers—proves to be illusory. Her presentation, largely though not exclusively based on this open-access book chapter, analyzed the consequences of these transformations on job quality at two key stages of the AI life cycle: its production through human labor (so-called “data work”) and its deployment in workplaces across various sectors, from logistics to healthcare. Taken together, they reveal how AI accelerates preexisting trends in the global economy: the outsourcing of business functions while maintaining control over production—a phenomenon studied by D. Weil as the “fissured workplace”—and a “regime of dispersion,” first theorized by C. Datchary, in which workers manage multiple disconnected tasks. To protect job quality, she argued, corporate strategies and labor regulations must address the cognitive overload associated with fissuring, develop worker-centered organizational models, and implement safeguards for all users. The Millennium Institute for Authority and Social Regulation (ASOR), recently created in Chile, aims to conduct cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the decline and reconfiguration of authority relationships in contemporary society and their impacts on social regulation. Authority, claim the founders of the Institute, is a pervasive social mechanism that is in place whenever there are power asymmetries. How people manage authority – in the family, school, workplace etc. – affects social cohesion and the extent to which (un)healthy relations of domination may arise. The rise of algorithmic management, especially AI-supported, is widely thought to affect labour relationships, endowing our bosses with new tools or even – as in the exemplary book by Aloisi and De Stefano) that algorithms actually are our new bosses. At the same time, the rise of platform labour – also closely linked to the AI boom – has promoted the model of independent workers who have no boss. Authority in the workplace changes gets more fragmented, disrupting traditional relational models, not only vertically (the hierarchical chain of command), but also horizontally (team composition, collegial work). What are the effects?

Edemilson Paraná invites Paola Tubaro to participate in a special issue published in the journal Globalizations that critically interrogates the convergence of environmental sustainability and digitalization. Governments and multi-lateral institutions frame the “twin transition” as a strategy to foster economic growth and durable social prosperity at the same time. However, Paraná argues in his introductory article (co-authored with Rodrigo Santaella-Gonçalves), this agenda is shaped by market logics and geopolitical competition, in ways that ultimately contradict the social and ecological goals it supposedly supports. The special issue has been designed to offer a systemic political-economy perspective on this inconsistency, grounded in critical social sciences and heterodox economics. Overall, it shows how the structural drivers of digitalisation can constrain its green potential and identifies pathways for redirecting the transition towards socially equitable and ecologically sustainable transformations. Paola Tubaro’s article within the issues aims to reconcile two separate trends in the study of the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), one focused on the natural and the other on the social surroundings that supply resources for its production and use. She introduces the concept of the ‘dual footprint’ as a heuristic device to capture the commonalities and interdependencies between them. For that, she uses two in-depth case studies, each illustrating international flows of raw materials (nature) and of labour services (society). Case studies are a preliminary illustration of a broader idea, that will need to be developed further: that the AI industry is a value chain that spans national boundaries and perpetuates inherited global inequalities. Specifically, she uses the case of Argentina as a provider to the United States and Madagascar as a provider to France, Japan and South Korea. It appears that the countries that drive AI development (here, the United States, France, Japan and South Korea) generate a massive demand for inputs and trigger social costs that, through the value chain, largely fall on more peripheral actors (here, Argentina and Madagascar). While Argentina and Madagascar differ under many respects, in both cases initial hopes of jobs and prosperity have failed to materialise as predominant outsourcing arrangements reinforce informality and precariousness without preventing environmental damage. Put differently, the arrangements in place distribute the costs and benefits of AI unequally, resulting in unsustainable practices and preventing the upward mobility of relatively more disadvantaged countries. The concept of the dual footprint is useful because it grasps how the environmental and social dimensions of the dual footprint emanate from similar underlying socio-economic processes and geographical trajectories. To freely access the article click here

Public debate about work tends to fixate on numbers: jobs created, jobs lost, jobs threatened by automation. Job Quality in a Turbulent Era, a new volume edited by Agnieszka Piasna and Janine Leschke (Edward Elgar Publishing), asks a harder question: what is actually happening to the quality of work? The full book is available in open access via Edward Elgar Publishing. DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro contribute a chapter examining how AI and platformization are “fissuring” contemporary workplaces: fragmenting tasks, eroding protections, and reshaping job quality across sectors in ways that aggregate employment statistics simply cannot capture. The volume brings together a wide range of perspectives on how gender, precarity, migration, technology, and environmental conditions are reconfiguring work in an era of ongoing economic turbulence.