Waiting for the Robots

Having found the people, Casilli sorts the ways their labour gets concealed. The first he calls on-demand digital labour — the gig work we half-recognise. The driver, the delivery courier, the cleaner summoned by an app. The app presents itself as a neutral piece of software matching supply with demand, which lets the company avoid calling itself an employer. The platform looks like infrastructure; the worker absorbs the risk, the waiting, the wear. Here the work is visible but its status is hidden, reclassified as self-employment so the automation story has someone to point at.

The second is micro-work, and this is where the book bites hardest. These are the tasks too small to call jobs: tagging an image, transcribing a receipt, judging whether a sentence is offensive, confirming that two photos show the same face. Platforms slice a problem into millions of fragments and distribute them to a crowd paid per fragment, often a cent or two each. No single task means anything. Together they train the models that will later be sold as intelligent. The worker never sees the product, the product never credits the worker, and the pay stays below almost any wage floor because, formally, no job was ever offered.

Where are these workers? Casilli went looking, and the geography is the quietly damning part of the book. Micro-work is a planetary operation that follows the familiar contours of economic inequality. Tasks priced in cents flow from the companies of wealthy countries toward places where those cents stretch further and where labour protections are thin or absent. He documents click workers across Venezuela during its economic collapse, across sub-Saharan Africa, across India and Southeast Asia — people for whom tagging images or moderating content became a plausible source of income precisely because the alternatives were worse.

The content moderation story is the hardest to read. Behind every platform that seems to magically keep violence and abuse off your screen sits a workforce watching that violence and abuse, hour after hour, deciding what stays and what goes. Casilli describes people in places like the Philippines and Kenya absorbing the internet's worst material so that the rest of us encounter a feed that feels safe and self-cleaning. The moderation looks automated. It is largely a person with a queue and a quota, carrying a psychological cost the brochure will never list.

Step back from the individual worker and a larger claim comes into view, and it is the one that makes Casilli's book more than an exposé. Automation, he argues, is not mainly a technical state of affairs. It is a frame — a way of describing work that reclassifies it as something else. When a company says a task has been automated, what has usually happened is that the task has been made cheaper, more fragmented, and harder to see. The robot is less a machine than a word we use to stop asking who did the work.

This reframing has a purpose, and it serves the people who deploy it. If the intelligence belongs to the system, the value belongs to whoever owns the system. The workers who labelled the data, moderated the content, and corrected the model become a cost to be minimised rather than a labour force with a claim on what they produced. The endlessly repeated fear that robots are coming for our jobs does quiet political work here: it treats automation as an impersonal force of nature, like weather, rather than a set of choices about how to organise and pay human beings.

We began with a person drawing a box around a pedestrian, paid in cents, waiting for the next image. Casilli's achievement is to put that person back into the picture we had been trained to see as empty. The seamless chatbot, the clever assistant, the feed that seems to clean itself — each turns out to rest on a scattered workforce doing piecework no one credits, in places the marketing never shows. The automation was always partly a staging, and the stage had people on it the whole time.