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Behind the Scenes of Automation: Ghostly Care-Work, Maintenance, and Interferences: Exploring participatory practices and methods to uncover the ghostly presence of humans and human labor in automation

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Industry and media have long represented automation as a harbinger of development and convenience in different areas of life. An anxious prospect to some, automation systems promise “progress” and profitability to others by conjuring corporate computational futures. What remains behind the scenes of these predictions and imaginaries of automation is the invisible human labor of global ghost workers caring for, maintaining, and repairing technologies. Invisible but irreplaceable, computation performed by humans in precarious conditions fills gaps that computer technologies lack skills and sensibility for. In this hybrid workshop, we ask who the “ghosts” are in the machines. The workshop will address the ghostly presence of humans and human labor in automation and its challenges to HCI research and design. 

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  1. Behind the Scenes of Automation: Ghostly Care-Work, Maintenance, and Interferences: Exploring participatory practices and methods to uncover the ghostly presence of humans and human labor in automation

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2023
      3914 pages
      ISBN:9781450394222
      DOI:10.1145/3544549
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Published: 19 April 2023

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      1. Automation
      2. Design Fiction
      3. Ghost work
      4. Labor

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