Research Publications

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is culminating in the structural transformation of the global workforce. As AI moves to decouple formal employment from economic growth, we may be witnessing the mass informalization of labor everywhere. This paper challenges the ‘formalist bias’ in current scholarship on AI and the future of work by emphasizing the role of informality. It positions this future as tied to the informal/formal dialectic, where the state and technology companies, the state-capital alliance, work together to actively create and then selectively maintain informality. AI is already built on the hidden, informal labor of ‘ghost workers’ who perform the microtasks that enable algorithms to be trained and function. The future of AI and work will expand beyond this reliance and actively create the informalization of the workforce, where labor dynamics typically applied analytically to the Global South become increasingly more prevalent in the Global North. The state-capital alliance bifurcates informality by criminalizing it from below and celebrating it from above. Despite these contradictions and tensions, this essay does not argue for abandoning AI. Rather, it argues that the political left should contest the grounds and ownership of AI through autogestion. Turning away from AI creates a vast vacuum for political repression and economic exploitation and abandons the possibility of self-management without a fight.