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This paper examines the rapid introduction of AI and automation technologies within essential industries amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on participant observation and interviews within two sites of waste labor in the United States, we consider the substantial effort performed by frontline workers who smooth the relationship between robotics and their social and material environment. Over the course of the research, we found workers engaged in continuous acts of calibration, troubleshooting, and repair required to support AI technologies over time. In interrogating these sites, we develop the concept of patchwork: human labor that occurs in the space between what AI purports to do and what it actually accomplishes. We argue that it is necessary to consider the often-undervalued frontline work that makes up for AI's shortcomings during implementation, particularly as CSCW increasingly turns to discussions of Human-AI collaboration.
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Discarded Labor:: Countervisualities for Representing AI Integration in Essential Work
This pictorial critically explores the role of visual media representations in the deployment of automated and artificially intelligent (AI) technologies within essential work sectors. We draw on an exhaustive review of local and national newspaper articles about automation in two waste labor industries (cleaning and recycling) over the last five years. We highlight a set of common visual tropes and move to challenge these representations by taking up the lens of countervisuality. Our analysis reveals that press photographs tend to focus on machines and the decision-makers who champion them, overlooking the work that it takes to integrate technology on the ground. Through our countervisuals, we depict the extensive efforts of waste workers to maintain AI technologies, and their potential for surveillance. Through visualizing under-recognized forms of labor that come after the design process ends, we highlight how an outsized emphasis on invention ignores waste workers’ expertise and needs over time.
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- PAR ID:
- 10256890
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '21: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 406 to 419
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462089
