Amir H. Payberah - 2025-04-27

Waiting for Robots by Antonio A. Casilli highlights an urgent but often overlooked topic: the invisible human labor that powers today's digital technologies. The book opens by contrasting two views of intelligent machines: Alan Turing's belief that machines could replicate human thinking through mechanical instructions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument that machines can calculate based on human knowledge and training without true understanding. While early excitement around AI seemed to confirm Turing's view, the book shows that recent developments support Wittgenstein's perspective: AI systems achieve impressive results not through independent intelligence, but through the massive, often hidden labor of people who annotate, correct, and refine these systems. Digital platforms, therefore, are not neutral tools; they are infrastructures designed to organize, extract, and conceal ongoing human labor.

Drawing on Marxist theory, the book shows how platforms extract surplus value from digital work in more hidden, fragmented, and globalized ways than traditional factory labor. Through "taskification", platforms break down workers' efforts into small, repetitive tasks, disconnecting them from the final product and from one another. At the same time, the book critiques neoliberal narratives that portray digital labor as flexible, entrepreneurial, and empowering. In practice, while promising freedom, platforms impose stricter control over workers' time, actions, and pay through algorithms and opaque rules, shifting risks onto individuals while offering little security.

Ultimately, the book points toward possibilities for resistance and change. It advocates for platform cooperativism, where workers collectively own and manage platforms, ensuring a fairer distribution of value and better working conditions. It also calls for treating data as a commons, recognizing that the data fueling AI and platforms is collectively produced and should be collectively governed, not privately owned and exploited. These ideas challenge the foundations of today's digital capitalism and offer a vision for a more just, democratic, and worker-centered digital future. However, this is just the beginning; we need collective effort and sustained action to truly change the situation.