How Companies Use Employees to Do Robotic Work

A large number of companies facing increasing pressure to improve operations with modern technology have discovered a cheaper way to respond to demands – training people to do the work of robots and thereby circumventing the usual technical difficulties that come with introducing innovations, writes the Guardian.

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For example, Google promised its users to stop the practice of computer scanning the content of Gmail inboxes, but third parties – various software developers – still have access to private data.

Here are some more examples: the startup company SpinVox, which converts voicemails into text messages, has been accused of using people instead of robots; Edison Software used engineers for artificial intelligence instead of chatbots responsible for scheduling meetings and checking users’ emails ; the Expensify app responsible for scanning business and personal receipts and creating expense reports also partially used people instead of technology.

Even Facebook, which has heavily invested in artificial intelligence, relied on people for its virtual Messenger assistant.

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In some cases, people are there just to make the system more accurate and help in the ‘learning’ of artificial intelligence to take over the work, but in other cases, companies claim to use AI technology, although in reality, the work is done by people.

Such concealment of information from users is not ethical at all, psychologists warn, especially in light of the realization that there are also cases where robots pretend to be humans.