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Lilly Irani | Algorithms of Suspicion: Quasi-criminalization and the erosion of work
Also streamed online via Zoom during the event.
Abstract
This talk examines the combination of policies, practices, and algorithms of suspicion that control workers’ access to wages and work on digital labor platforms. I show how “fraud” acts as a quasi-legal category that legitimizes and protects platform operators’ unilateral decisions to fire workers. This case study begins with the problem of opaque account suspensions suffered by good faith workers on the platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Through an investigation of patents, research papers, and industry documentation, the chapter constructs a view of the models and assumptions Amazon deploys to guess the difference between good and bad workers. These algorithms and the opaque organizational routines that deploy them submit workers to automated surveillance, suspicion, and terminating action – managing workers at scale and at a distance.
These practices may have discriminatory consequences, sometimes in ways recognized by legally recognized protected categories and sometimes not. I conclude by arguing that existing digital rights frameworks must be revised to give workers rights and protections against platforms’ algorithmic forms of management.
Bio
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego where she is the Faculty Director of the UC San Diego Labor Center. She also serves as affiliate faculty in Computer Science, the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, and the program in Critical Gender Studies. She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.
This talk is hosted by Michigan AI seminar series and Women in Computing Seminar series at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, co-sponsored by ESC.
