Work

In the 1st of a new series Aleks Krotoski gets down to work. From micro-taskers paid pennies to be the janitors of our digital services to car drivers jumping on the Uber bandwagon.

Aleks speaks to technology writer Kashmir Hill who spent a month as an invisible girlfriend writing loving texts to service subscribers for a few cents per message. This is just one example of 'micro-tasking' made famous by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. For Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford internet institute they're examples of the hidden human effort going into services we would assume were automated. Its a new form of piece work undertaken by a causal workforce doing it where and when it suits them.

This type of work treats you like part of a system managed by algorithms an artificial, artificial intelligence. In some senses this isn't anything new as work historian Richard Donkin explains using the examples of the time and motion studies pioneered by Fredrick Winslow Taylor and later taken up by He