Use, Delegation, or Beyond? Exploring Human-Technology Relationship in the Age of Algorithmically Organized Work

Digital labor platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are transforming work. Work practices previously performed by humans are now heavily algorithmic- driven. This short paper reports on an ongoing in-depth qualitative investigation of the conditions and relations of MTurk-enabled work and offers insights on how work- related practices such as recruitment, performance evaluation, rewarding, and promotion that strongly influence workers’ conditions and nature of work are consequentially being performed by algorithms—often in obfuscated ways. Far from the traditional instrumentalist view towards human-technology relationship that highlights how humans use technology in their work, in these novel forms of work, at times, it is the humans who work for the algorithms. As such, we argue for the need to go beyond the concept of IS use in theorizing the human-technology relationship in the context of platform work in our current age of algorithms. The conclusion briefly discusses the appropriateness of the IS Delegation framework as such an alternative to investigate the redistribution of roles, rights, and responsibilities in algorithmic labor markets.