Could the future of work be data production?

In the early days of the internet, one of the mottos among hackers and tech enthusiasts was that "information wants to be free." However, it was precisely this desire and intention that gave rise to what Jaron Lanier, Microsoft's chief technology officer, calls "siren servers": entities that found a way to profit from this "free" environment and grow it to unimaginable proportions. The side effect of this endeavor, on the other hand, is what economists call a "monopsony" of data buyers. In other words, it is a scenario where the monopoly system is inverted, with a few buyers holding the vast majority of market power—in this case, a data market.

In the paper “Should We Treat Data as Labor?”, Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez Hernández, Jaron Lanier, and E. Glen Weyl address the issue of how data is the new oil of the global economy and how this has actually become a problem—given the scandals surrounding how Facebook distributes user-collected data, as well as other cases of technologies that are supposedly "free" but collect data to be resold to advertisers and other interested companies. For the authors, as long as data is treated as a free territory for tech companies to exploit, there is a lack of bargaining power that prevents any meaningful way to negotiate payment for the data produced by these users, while also leaving them vulnerable to privacy invasions. This is why the authors suggest transforming the concept of data production into labor rather than capital.

“We argue that thinking of data as labor rather than capital is much more than a play on words, a distinction without a difference. It is important that we, as a society, think and talk about user-generated data as an input for production, just as we treat labor differently from capital. There is a certain sense of respect and meaning that comes from our work, and workers respond to incentives to work harder and produce higher-quality services and products. We argue that treating returns on data as returns on capital not only increases inequality but also limits productivity gains in the face of the artificial intelligence revolution.”

In other words, in a future of work scenario where artificial intelligence and robotics will take over many of the jobs currently held by humans, unemployment will be a consequence for those who stop producing wealth for both their country and themselves. With the current situation, where data is treated as a currency for us to access platforms and services for free, this will not be sustainable as robots begin to work for us.

Thus, just as the universal basic income proposal suggests a redistribution of the wealth produced by robotic labor, there is also a proposal to create a basic income that redistributes the wealth generated by the manipulation and resale of this data produced and collected by users—or perhaps jobs based on data production, so that tagging your friend in a photo or posting a selfie on a social network is no longer just something for your friends and family to like, but content that is rewarded, for example, in a blockchain-based system.

This is an idea that artist and activist Manuel Beltrán has been advocating for a few years with his installations and art projects such as the Institute of Human Obsolescence or even the Data Production Labour (2017), which we have already discussed in a previous post. For the authors of the paper “Should we treat data as labor?”, however, there are still many implications that do not appear in the material published by the group, but there is already a movement to think critically about the situation and find alternatives for a future in which artificial intelligence and robotics will play an important and likely decisive role in the future of work and humanity.