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      Humanly Extended Automation or the Future of Work Seen through Amazon Patents

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      Science, Technology, & Human Values
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Amazon’s projects for future automation contribute to anxieties about the marginalization of living labor in warehousing. Yet, a systematic analysis of patents owned by Amazon suggests that workers are not about to disappear from the warehouse floor. Many patents portray machines that increase worker surveillance and work rhythms. Others aim at incorporating workers’ activities into machinery to rationalize the labor process in an ever more pervasive form of digital Taylorism. Patents materialize the company’s desire for a technological future in which workers act and sense on behalf of machinery, becoming its living and sensing appendages. In this new relationship, humans extend machinery and its reach. Through the work-in-progress process of reaching increasing levels of automation, Amazon develops new technical foundations that consolidate its power in the digital workplace.

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          Algorithms of Oppression

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            Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation

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              Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy

              This article evaluates the job quality of work in the remote gig economy. Such work consists of the remote provision of a wide variety of digital services mediated by online labour platforms. Focusing on workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the article draws on semi-structured interviews in six countries (N = 107) and a cross-regional survey (N = 679) to detail the manner in which remote gig work is shaped by platform-based algorithmic control. Despite varying country contexts and types of work, we show that algorithmic control is central to the operation of online labour platforms. Algorithmic management techniques tend to offer workers high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety and complexity. However, these mechanisms of control can also result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
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                Journal
                Science, Technology, & Human Values
                Science, Technology, & Human Values
                SAGE Publications
                0162-2439
                1552-8251
                July 29 2020
                : 016224392094366
                Affiliations
                [1 ]University of Toronto Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
                Article
                10.1177/0162243920943665
                8bf6b731-ae98-4bd0-9d6b-78f81e0d2bde
                © 2020

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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