Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation
09 January 2025
Antonio A. Casilli, professor of sociology at Télécom Paris, announces the release of his new book, Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, now available from the University of Chicago Press!
This book has traveled an incredible journey, starting with its French initial publication and expanding to readers worldwide through six editions, including Arabic, German, Italian, and Spanish. Now, this updated and expanded English edition lands at a crucial moment in the global conversation about artificial intelligence and labor. The journal Science has already given it a glowing review.
This updated edition addresses key issues, including:
- The rise of generative AI and large language models,
- The pandemic’s lasting impact on labor markets and on supply chains,
- Emerging worker movements against AI and platform exploitation.
The book is also perfectly suitable for academic courses on digital labor, technology studies, sociology, and political economy.
Critical Acclaim for Waiting for Robots
Waiting for Robots makes a substantial contribution to the discourse on digital labor and platform capitalism… Casilli’s incisive analysis of the hidden human costs of AI, combined with his clear and engaging prose, establishes the book as essential reading for those seeking to understand the ethical and social dimensions of technology.
Science
Casilli’s pioneering book, now updated and available for the first time in English, completely upends the celebratory myths about AI. Through a quite remarkable range of international fieldwork, Casilli shows how exploited human workers, usually in the Global South, not only train AI, but often literally do the exhausting work branded as ‘artificial’ intelligence.
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics
Disturbing…. Artificial intelligence, according to its advocates, holds out the promise of an end to mind-numbing, exploitative work. Casilli vehemently disagrees. He argues that it has merely changed the type of labor and the structure of the exploitation, and he has a mountain of research to support his case.
Kirkus Reviews
With a blend of analysis and a subtly wry sense of humor, he debunks the myth of Al-driven job replacement, exposing how human labor is reconfigured and concealed within digital platforms. Bridging history, media, philosophy, and business, this page-turning work redefines our understanding of digital labor.
Trebor Scholz, New School
Sweeping in its scope and exacting in its analysis, Waiting for Robots stands out as one of the most perceptive and critical accounts of AI in recent times. Casilli reveals the hidden fingerprints of human labor on these technologies, as long as we know where—and how—to look.
Gabriella Coleman, Harvard University
Header image source www.casilli.fr