Algorithmic Control
Last week I got carried away with research led teaching. Three important reports came out recently about AI and algorithmic management and (now don’t laugh) since I was teaching performance management to undergraduates in a business school context, I took the chance to present the current state of play based on actual evidence.
The APPG Future of Work produced an important report about algorithmic management and the use of AI technologies The New Frontier: Artificial Intelligence at Work. In it there is remarkable cross party consensus on the threat of algorithmic management and the impact on workers. Even supporting an emerging public policy call for an Accountability for AI Act in the UK. Significant in that it recognises most of us have no idea what AI technologies are at play in our daily lives, their consequences and how they will impact us, significantly making the link to poor mental health. No longer AI jazz hands setting us up for a life of high skilled leisure, more the ethical and social impact of losing control of our working lives.
Connected to this are two more reports – the first from the TUC Technology Managing Work, written from the perspective of worker experience. There’s a thing, asking people about their experiences. Unsurprisingly it outlines the potential of algorithmic management for increasing discrimination and insecurity at work – particularly in the use of AI in recruitment – all rolled into an ethical bun fight over privacy and surveillance. Most of us have no idea how much we are already being compromised by work.
Cutting to the chase, the third report relates to online platforms and The Amazonian Era – outlining the model of work organisation established through platformisation and with it the obscurification of responsibility and accountability. A neat link to the Good Work Charter underlining the trusted industrial relations text book fault lines for decent work. Autonomy, participation and fairness.
One online resource pack later and I seamlessly segue into an assignment that encourages students to write about their experiences in the gig economy and exciting stuff from the call centre front line emerges. Big slap on the adult education back and a reminder how powerful consciousness raising is in helping us understand life in the matrix I head off home.
Just a little bit best pleased with myself right on cue the neoliberal gods decided to slap me down to size by hurling me into the algorithmic seventh circle of hell that is the Welsh taxi sector.
As a single parent working full time+ I am organised. I book my taxis 6 hours ahead, I like to speak to an actual person, generally creep up to them and let them know that I really really have to get that train to avoid the everyday catastrophic consequences of not-being-there. Gratuitous but you know, thing about being vulnerable is that you at least know you need to make friends.
So as the minutes tick by I start to panic – suddenly nobody is answering the phones and I’m shunted into an automated call centre cul-de-sac of no-option-options. Your taxi is here-but-not-here. You no longer have a taxi. We’re finding you a driver. It’s rush hour, another hour. A person (?) from Veezu - “amazing journeys” - customer services sends me the following:
“I'm sorry to hear a taxi was later to reach you than you expected. We endeavour to get a taxi to you as close to your requested pick up time as possible. All pre-bookings are put into a queueing system and dispatched before their pick up times. All driver partners are self employed so bid on these jobs and choose which jobs they accept or decline. As a result, all pick up times are estimates and there is a shortage of drivers for all companies in the industry at the moment but we do send the next available taxi to you. We ask that customers leave an hour between the pick up or dispatch time and the connection time for train times. However, I apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any further queries about this please see our terms and conditions below.”
I’m sorry you are upset but our policy states that you must leave an hour for a ten minute journey and even then we can’t guarantee anyone wants to accept your bid. You seem needy, are you being needy? Completely unselfconsciously spelling out the problem with online platforms. They are not in the business of actual transport. They are in the business of data.
An hour and 15 other travellers abandoning all hope later, I crawl into a taxi sobbing. I say to the driver if he tells me to cheer up I’ll do something very ugly to his cab. So this is where I love Wales because you still have politicised taxi drivers and interesting taxi rides like they used to be back in the day. Apparently the taxi firm has undergone uberisation for real. Literally handed over control to an algorithm, a kind of bad Uber with not enough drivers and which can’t actually organise taxis when there is actual traffic on the roads. We discussed Veezu’s need to understand its Marxist dialectics because platform capitalism only works with a labour surplus. We acknowledge each other’s devastation – the missed trains and less-than-living-wages. The rules of gaming, tinder with a drop of Bladerunner all rolled into a brilliant narrative about whatever happened to people? We remembered mournfully old school control rooms where there was someone in the system with actual control and responsibility for getting an old person to hospital.
When I returned to face to face teaching I started to carry books again to offer an escape from the fact that nothing really works any more. It’s not with a small amount of irony the two books in my bag are Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (Polity) and the way-ahead-of-the-rest-of-us Ursula Huws’ The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (Merlin Press), offering a crystal-clear systemic walk through the WTFs of platform capitalism and algorithmic control.
“Uber, despite presenting itself as an empty vessel for market forces, shapes the appearance of a market. It predicts where the demand for drivers will be and raises surge prices in advance of actual demand, while also creating phantom cabs to give an illusion of greater supply. In their position of an intermediary, platforms gain not only access to more data but also control and governance over the rules of the game.” (Srnicek, 2007:47)
The rules of the game have changed – it’s not about me getting a taxi to the train, to the station, to the motorway to the no-parking-space in order to pick up a child who won’t speak to me for being late. Nope, it was just a game where drivers and passengers bid for each other and, as is so often true in life, if either party has actual needs they find the system to be completely and utterly useless. Turns out we are all being set up for failure in a system of supply and demand that is centred on data and its control.
“Other aspects of the rationalization and automation of services also produce new types of unpaid work that the consumer must carry out, in the form of self-service….In the guise of “do-it-yourself” self-service has also replaced traditional crafts such as cabinet making and trades like painting and decorating, while giving rise to profitable new industries manufacturing the tools and products that make such deskilling possible.” (Huws, 2003:45)
And taxis apparently. The next day I cut out the intermediaries and walked to work serving only myself for a precious hour before entering the metrics-matrix.