Faculty member of the Economics Department and the cochair of the mit work of the future attack force that was commissioned a year ago the spring and the purpose of the task force is to engage in confront the sense that many have that the labor market and technology is changing rapidly to understand why people are anxious, to figure out how concerned they should be, what is changing and what is different this time and what can we do to ensure that the coming era of change needs to not productivity growth but some that show up in our focus is on the labor market and how we make the labor market function well for as many workers as possible. Thats where we see the opportunity and the challenge in the lesson if you read the Task Force Report which was released last week, one thing that we s say, i think a critical economic lesson of the 21st century, a wellfunctioning labor market is the foundation for a healthy middleclass in a wellfunctioning political system. Without that foundation of opportunity and prosperity is difficult for many other things to work well. Our focus is working on making work work and thats why its an honor to have mary gray here from the university of research, talking about her book ghost work. Heres a photograph and heres the actual person and just to give you a tiny bit of background, mary is a cultural anthropologist whose work has been on the communication and use of technology of young queer people and how they use technology and other means to establish identities, to identify one another. She was recruited and once there she got interested in the question of how Artificial Intelligence was said by workers, often times hidden inside the machine. So you can feel the uniformity and this is kind of the intermediation between machines and people and often identities that are completely obvious to the participants involved. I read her book and i thought it was quite ongoing and some of the things i have been doing and we are delighted to have barry here, shes going to speak to you about 25 minutes about the book and then there will be questions answered future pencils ready and will be delighted to hear your questions. Thank you for indulging me and giving me a lecture to set up the conversation. Im just going to stop for a Second Period how many of your part about the recent decision in california. I hope that comes up in q a, primetime. How many have you have ever received the 1099 or done contract work . Wonderful. , how many of you lets make it easier, how many do you you have a friend that use of ridesharing app called uber or lyft. Perfect. With that, we all have a stake in this conversation. Arguably. Or definition, Michael Arthur came up with this turn not to describe particular kinds of work, not about a particular set of mixed jobs, arguably to describe the reorganization of fulltime employment. What we want to think about where the conditions that are created through the opacity around workers contribution in the value of ondemand work so keep in mind, hopefully you will notice in the book, they you will never be a reference to go to the workers, youll see references the ghost work and that was intentional and of course like anything after you publish it you dont control after words out of your hand. I want to give you an idea of what the mechanism behind the work we are talking about and what connects this work that i will describe two apps and other kinds of platforms that you might be familiar with. What you want to understand, the early 2000 computer, scientists and engineers realize they can take the same sort of mechanism for calling and putting out a particular call interfaces, apis that would draw up software to execute a program and they can spread people into the executable. So they quickly ended up creating a mechanism that could help them with their work which was offered around 800 data labeling and other kinds of tasks that was piecework, youll be familiar with amazon more than any but we will suggest this is just the beginning, this is the piece that you can see. But as any business that has a task that wants to demand or request to help with. Something that can be put on a platform between the relationship between a twosided market, and an abstract thats works going on with the mechanism. This is any taskbased project driven work that can at least in part be sourced, scheduled, managed, shipped and billed through an application programming interface to the internet. Hold onto that and think about how much world of work it could develop if youre applying the mechanism to the distribution of request for work and people being able to pick up the tasks. Thats what i want to suggest to you is the framing we should use in the future about work, not automation and if anything, even laster talking about the future of work was often like robots, we started thinking differently about that but in many ways we have not come to the floor with the framework if its not robust, what is it, were suggesting is potentially ghost work and we need to stop it before its built into everything that we do. So importantly you are probably familiar with the category of online offline Platform Services anything from uber, lift, doordash, then using the same mechanism, and api application interface putting out a request for somebody to pick up the food, deliver it to this address and the platform is participating in the exchange by recording when they picked up and delivered, executing a payment, scheduling where it will arrive, giving an address, that portion of the work is automated but the delivery and the value of somebody being there to deliver the food, thats the equation we are not considering or more increasingly were aware because we can see the folks, if i had said content moderation was a form of the labor i dont think anybody wouldve known what i was talking about until analytic type. You will know the content moderation of the job that people do that is absolutely providing another service which is training Artificial Intelligence but importantly those are people on an executable loop performing a very important service. We are focused on the vast World Business start up, often businesstobusiness services that will be below the surface, if anything you oversee as a consumer. That is the world of work im going to talk about today. Is the world of editing, the world of testing, data labeling, perhaps some of you in the room, many of these different tasks do drive Artificial Intelligence innovation, instructions a clean data set and i love being in it because most in the room know what im saying when i say that. But importantly in increasingly seen the number of jobs, it is quite hard to nail the a. I. But will just keep a person threaded into a Service Request which perhaps textbased, anytime you got onto a website and have a little help window pop up, you know its a mixture of script and a person who is assisting you. So in thinking about that world of work, when you have a person doing something on the spot that cannot be quite completed by automation, theres probably points of reference that come to mind and we cover this in the book, places to thread together, this is not new, the continuity and how we treated people who would be a moment because automation would come around and they will be replaced. That might look like piecework when in the days of textiles certainly those who have had manufacturing knockout are short but couldve added the button or the bow, for quite some time, usually that was a matter of decades, thats the important thing to take away, automation made it possible for piecework to go away and textiles in some cases and other cases both labor cost but also the reality of the paradox of automation last miles being too sophisticated for a text file. Machinery to consume their automation. Then a person was kept around. Its also in the world of federal Contract Labor. The example of the women who were made famous in the films in the figures who could at the time be brought into service, computers which we again at mit know that was a reference to the people, not the machine and that was quickly when the need in the demand for their services as computational experts eventually disappeared, they could be let go. There was a security and that employment, that it was not less valuable, we didnt have a way of looking at unemployment and seeing the women as valuable pricinprecisely because we move forward of what it was to value working a fulltime employment in a particular profession and often particular bodies embodied in those professions, white men of privilege who had very specific roles to play, anyone who not playing those roles seem dispensable. To continue the lineage by the 1960s and the advancement of staffing, that quite literally, i point you to the beautiful book on the economy, quite literally brokered on the value or the devaluing of womens labor as a resource because they go after young woman who is collegeeducated and make great office girls, a nonoffensive term of the time, there also expendable. So keeping the thread moving, by the time we get to the 1980s and two thousands in the outsourcing and off shoring of knowledge work, it becomes much harder to make the case that people are doing something that could so easily be replaced, precisely because theyre doing work that is being done by workers in the United States, it becomes much more obvious this is a question of labor offer trash, you can find cheap labor that is just as educated as anyone that is generating the request for work and i often met some of my colleagues, the settlement of the case against microsoft that involve microsoft, meant that we never resolve the question of what do you do in the case of employment that is necessary for a period of time, project driven, you might need somebody with a specific expertise, language expertise, but you know you are not going to need them for more than 12 months or 12 weeks or 12 days. What ways do we have to value that worker. And at the time we really did not have a category four that. Its important to note the post 2000 Silicon Valley and especially 2001 what happens effectively the. Com bubble burst then at that moment we resolved and settled without case law that were going to leave questionable what to do with people as necessary but not necessary as were going to hold them for career and what we came up with in the settlement were a set of practices that treat Contract Labor through vendor Management Systems that often dont leave them with the protection beyond the 12 month contract to be able to say unemployed and these benefits come with my employment. If you think about the history that weve drawn and it certainly an argument, any historical trajectory is an argument, in this case we see the setting in place from the beginning of the industrial era of laws around labor protection that mostly assume the valuable work is the work that cannot be automated without much projection that may become the target of automation. So policies built for Assembly Lines and professions that were beyond the touch of automation and in the whys of Temp Staffing which driven our Economic Activity globally is the growth of a Service Industry that serves people request for need more than a serves the need to build something. And lastly to see the shift towards arguably the information economy that involved people doing Information Service work. Yes it involved people doing coding and other valuable skills to take great amount of training but if you think about what it took to code up a website back in the 2000 and you have the hand coat html, how many people in the room know what im talking about, that is done with software. And we paid quite a bit of money to build peoples website, for my first work as a 1099. Keep that in mind as you thinking about what can be automated, what is in the work of the creative look, the complex communication that seems beyond automation. Thats an open question. What is it that will be constantly on the horizon that requires human touch for some amount of time although we cannot see growing into a career. With that, let me give you how we studied this world, studying is a distributed world of work, not the most obvious thing to do, it was hard to figure out where to begin, we chose for businesses as case study to be where we identify groups of workers and also these companies to show the inside of the black box, how did they organize the work, what does the workflow look like and for the world of the mechanism that can build out Artificial Intelligence but keep humans in the loop. Theres two things of work, in terms of framing if there is something i hope you take away to see that the growing world of work is really growing into different directions, one is increasing need to structure and analyze data and take the example of a radiologist, using a. I. And health and radiology is not a one and done matter, you might be able to do a great job of getting Image Recognition for particular problem with him radiology to seemed like theyre going to get rid of the radiologist. You just expand the market for people using radiology especially to create mechanisms for getting outside of urban centers that is the places where no one has been able to get access to a stream and you also created a market for other kinds of diagnostics, you gonna require amount of domain expertise by medical professional. It is not a doctor doing that work or radiologist, and might be a medical student or a new profession on the horizon. So thinking about that world of work that is managing the information and data that we are collecting, that will build Artificial Intelligence and take over the need for human hand in the mix, but then the second stream which is just as critical, human in the loop Information Services what we come to expect as consumers but someone who will be able to answer my call 24 7. I would love it if none of us had the expectation. I would really love to feel that somebody is not inspecting of me. The reality of a number of Small Businesses that want to offer you a prompt to take your medication if youre taking care of an elderly parent and what that prompt be sent to the parent but also something to tell you how their care is going today, those cases are the world of human in the loop that are not fulltime employment, the pastoring, project driven work. In the case of our study, the two things of work are analyzed through the cases of companies that both do image tagging and verification, we pick these things so people thought it would be easy to automate, the not so easy to automate. And then contact moderation is another example of the stream of work that we hopefully would be able to remove human hand with automation and content moderation is a fantastic boundary object that says its really hard to get rid of people from the task of the viewing content. Because anything that is not an obvious black or white is something that is very difficult to automate. You have to have yes no, you have to have four things that tells you this not that, if you have humans deliberating the hate speech or love signal. And we debate that. How do you classify when is that hate speech and when is not a moment of intimate loving exchange. Content moderators are a part of the solution for being able to facilitate and identify what is going on in that moment. Also social media, we dont have to worry about this. There is not option. And then the second set translation and captioning a video in a generation, these are wonderful cases like this is a business, businesses serving other businesses. Theres a lot of Economic Activity happening. So we chose the United States and india because we wanted a complicated project to work on and keep doing work for seven years. And no notice some patterns in much of the cases with india that we met in the south and the conversation about that, theres less obvious of a pattern in the United States im looking for anybody who would like to keep looking for the analysis of the data sets because we barely scratched the surface of what patterns we can see but importantly the material comes from thousands of interviews im sorry thousands of surveys and hundreds of interviews. Were in peoples lives for that pattern and their routine in and out of these markets. In doing the skilled work, it was also an effort to figure how do we look at the largescale data that these companies are producing. We are able to get to the transactional data so we can see how many clients are requesting the services, how long do they stick around, do they change what request they have . I want to leave you with two findings, hopefully this gives you a taste of whats in the book. For me the most pressing the first like any open call, any environment we are saying there is no obligation, and fact there is no commitment but if you like to come in and do something, come on in. Guess what happens, you end up with folks who are really in it who want to make it a fulltime income stream that theyve identified as enough money to make the rest of the economic reality manageable. Because you have a percentage of people that will see value in saying and will turn to this work. Then you have another good core 20 who are saying im going to do this in a set amount of time, they have their reasons and ill get to that in a moment. They are the deep backup, the bench that is there and when the 10 is walk away because her kids are sick and they need to do something else, you as a consumer will never know that the 10 is really good inefficient as executing on a Task Force Project ever walked out. Because the regulars are there effectively making themselves available to be ondemand to being consumer. Lastly most importantly, this is a lesson that feels really important to me in the wake of the california case, you have a long tail of people were experimenting with the labor markets, they were particular kind of capacity or capability that theyre bringing to the table maybe they want to trade debugging or coding, maybe they want to practice the language and they want to see if this is more interesting or economically viable that im doing today. Or can i mix it into the other things that im doing. So it makes any survey of labor Statistics Survey work and really challenging. If you asked somebody in this world which is your first job and your second job, they do not have an easy answer to that question, a different mental model for what theyre doing in the distribution of participation is creating these emergent mental maps where you can have people when we asked them what are they doing and they can answer that they work for Silicon Valley startup or their and entrepreneur which means they see themselves as a Small Business owner or their selfemployed, freelancers in some ways they dont understand the difference between the last two statements, they were all on the same platform doing the exact same task. So how would you survey this fact to find out the work attitude. How would they have different understandings of what they are doing, that is really the core of what we need to talk about, what is that people are after when they participate in the labor markets, what need are they trying to meet that is not meant for formal employment. We found several different things, but only three kept coming up and all of the interviews and all the survey work that we did, watching them make decisions about whether they stayed or left the markets. It was to control their time which often meant the head o otr obligations and commitment, it was to control the projects to have some sense of agency over what they were doing because they worked in environments when they were told what to do and they found that alienating. And lastly with they wanted to control the working environment and this is a q a, please somebody ask what it means to allow people to make choices about who they work with and how that has both upside and downside. And this is not a matter of flexible become i recommend everybody stop talking about this environment. Its about control, that says there is an absence of the capacity to control, dimensioning of Peoples Agency to move into formal employment that meets other needs that they have. In these cases they are wrapping work around their lives instead of their lives around work. It is not a nice to have in many cases for women who we interviewed because they have other obligations that are demanding more from their time. And when somebody like camilla says this work allows her to control her work, shes not talking about the transition, thats not her ideal life, its been able to make room and have income to support her desire to do dance choreography. And for me its really important not to tell carmelo that she is wrong and she should get a job that would be comfortable in her area which is what we have most Work Opportunities in the formal sector, it is working at a retail and sales, she did not want to do that, she had an opportunity to do that and left it because she found this more manageable. So where do we go from here, thats for the rest of the conversation. Theres a chapter on that in the book. I just want to tee up what are the pressing concerns, vertically talking with labor organizers about where do we have to contend with because the downside of a world of Contract Labor and independent worker in environments, there is no center of gravity, no anchor to the collective organizing that has been the linchpin to advancing workers rights but also things like wages. I will put out there now, if anybody is wondering that the market is going to solve the wage situation for contract workers, we need to remind ourselves, the market never did. It was always intervention, society saying we want work to look like this. We wanted to have these kinds of securities, these kinds of benefits, we have not done that yet for contract work at all in the United States, this is an important point, its embarrassing to talk about this outside the United States. Key takeaways if we want to organize workers and to help them be able to shift the debate around what their needs are and recognize these labor markets they will never be on a single fight. They will not have a single employer of record, theyre not working with unified professional identity, that is so key, heidi organize if you dont see a common cause and the person that might be next you doing this work because are just an experimentalist. But their globally networked, theres not a way to do this work arguably without seeing it as effectively as the labor supply chain in a multinational that has information needs that are not in one language or one cultural context. You need to see collective achievement, the Value Proposition of the labor platform is not an individual giving you something, its many people been available to you. When i asked you about the app, most of the time when we open an app, its really compelling, you have several different cars hovering around your neighborhood who might be able to get you, if you saw one car and there was a company that could offer you five cars hovering, the value of the workers are offering availability to you. Their collective contribution of being available. We do not know how to value that arguably. I think that the most important conversation to have. White seem so easy to devalue people to us. I would argue, even with California Assembly bill five, we do not have laws governing this world yet. I dont think we do. So what would it take to ten this world as a common, i think there is some argue i argument y not about the ecosystem of a raw material or environment, im talking about a social common where many things are going on in the world of the workers who are making themselves available on this platform, what would it look like to see their needs and prioritize those as necessarily needs to be filled so they can be sustainably available. You dont want to just not care about their need for scheduling for example or their need for a wage war or the need for healthcare for example. I will leave you with those few thoughts and before i do that, its impossible to work on label like this and not have a slide that thinks everybody who has been involved in this project. With that. [applause] terrific. We are going to take your questions, but before im going ask a couple of questions. The first thing, im going ask a quick question from two different directions, i would like you to bring out the way its not just the machine saying heres the task, but the way the people hired and fired through the platform itself in a way that they dont, can you say more about that to give people a sense of what that looks like. When i was seeing the application programming interface can build, i think we can all recite that by the end of this talk, through apis in the internet, there is a way in which the management of this process said so early days, in a nice way of putting it. It walks you through what it feels like to effectively be managed by a set of scripps, i dont want to fancy it up with a. I. A set of scripts that are written by somebody making a request, just like any boss, lots of bosses do not know exactly what they want so in the moments when a request is made, somebodys been really clear on what they want, the cost is absorbed by the worker. So for example put a task on a platform and is being managed by algorithm, there are things that can happen like in the book that we describe, the most distressing case of having his work account suspended, its not clear why you suspended, this is not uncommon, ones that are accounted effectively locked out of your workplace. But even more unsettling, i dont want to put this as a maniacal act but if you could no longer confirm the identity of somebody working through an account who is not on site, you dont how to issue the last paycheck. So his last paycheck just disappeared. There is no there is no person there in contact with when theyre doing this work so they can be just shot down and they have no mechanism of appeal. Think about the worst example of Customer Service like being trapped in a phone tree is bad but at your work. I want to ask a question, people moving out of agriculture and piecework, is this considered that people have to leave their homes to work and you said we want people to wrap their lives around their work rather than their work around their lives. I would much rather my work wrapped around my life, why do i have to leave my house, why can i not be with my family and choose hours they want, the full notion that we have to commute every morning, be home every night. That is a way that were incompatible with the family and as it hinders and so on. Is there some upside that we should think about and is there a way to blend the different models . For me, absolutely. This is in some ways more optimistic than the cover of the book suggests pre. [laughter] so there is potential. The number of people that we talked with, im thinking of this one woman, quite common in india who talked about to be able to do this work and not have to sit in a two hour commute. So as we move towards the climate action, just a shout out to say what would it look like to say work like this and being able to underwrite and having the municipality support opportunities for people to be able to work in their homes or in a setting that is near them in a town supported wifi hotspot is the possibility embedded in ghost work. You talk about some of the ways that people doing this work organized, not organized for purpose but working collaboratively, that is another future, not obvious to people now say. One of my favorite when sid realized that the finding that we had of how much people were collaborating offline was something we were able to math and quantitatively measure in that section we came up with of the distribution of engagement and you have a core group of people like any occupation when they got serious of turning this into an economic opportunity, the next thing they reached fort pierce, they needed to talk with other people who are doing the work to figure out how to optimize my time, who are the bad actors in this thing, how do i make sure im advancing or finding other opportunities. Theres pragmatic reasons that our work lives are social, theres economic value in the social exchange another Computer Scientist who spent decades working with human computation, it blows their mind that people talk to each other. My other conversation who finds 20 minutes growing, what you mean people will mentor each other for free. What is the world of economics that they dont like. Seen all those places where there is not direct payoff and people invest in the very social ways of connecting and collaborating, it is really wonderful finding but that does not go away. There is no job, often when somebody tells me this is meni menial, mindless work, who would need to communicate about that, i often take away a signal of what work they would not want to do. But the people doing this work know how to make meaning out of what theyre doing, humans are very good at making what they do meaningful. So were devaluing it. So please raise your hand the associate director please go ahead please introduce yourself. Eric is a member of the task force. One of the distressing things over the past couple of decades, how many people have been left behind, the economy is bigger, wages are lower for half the distribution and dimensions in terms of job insecurity im interested to hear of how much you think some of the things youre describing are symptoms versus contingent work. If you look at the top half of contribution, the disproportionate number are probably independent contractors, Small Business people, doctors, lawyers, consultants compared to the bottom half which are just perversely selling hours and on the bottom half many people, the example you gave from carmella, they like the flexibility that they get, im a very bad apple paul just when i write it who were and i asked them what theyre doing and many say that they got paid more in their previous job but wanted to have more flexibility so it was not the Company Setting their schedule but themselves. Some even said that they liked and algorithm giving them their jobs rather than the biased ditz under dispatcher that they had to is up to the taxi service that was always unfair to them. So there are cases that you give where it turned out really bad for people but is not a symptom of lack of bargaining under or specific institutional mechani mechanism. For after this project i really took away that it is both. As i think a baker or other people said the biggest problem is structural problem, that is certainly part of it, i think theres culturally something going on and where we placed our expectation of what makes a good job. And that we have not been paying attention to the shift to service economies, i think most people would agree that much of our economy is growing around services, is providing information, entertainment, break that down into what the job looks like and what places we have intervened to say were going to see that as a sustainable form of employment that leads to a middleclass experience or the possibility of people moving into the middle class globally. Would you see it as part of the way of helping people to make it less likely harder to have people do contingent work and more pushing them towards regular employment work, without be part of the solution or without be benefiting them. I think we can remain lunch of weare fixated on the good opportunities of fulltime employment, formal employment needleads to better opportunitin life. I dont see any thing that that is happening globally. The most appointing studying United States and india. In india there is a cap in which you dont see the expansion of formal employment, you see a ton of economic opportunity. So you see a ton of Economic Activity, the issue is, what is the expectation, what are the institutional agreements on social contracts around anybody working, and unfortunately we are not starting from 0, were starting from legacies of colonialism and ways of imagining how we structure work that i believe have gotten in the way of us thinking lets reboot, i think theres good examples, sweden is a good example where it does not matter what kind of job you do, you will have basic needs met. And we havent gotten to that place in the United States to see the economic benefit of providing basic needs, to me this book th its the basic benefits that would, participating in Economic Life in the United States so it does not matter that a Company Moves you for twelvemonth source easily for two weeks, that will not hurt you economically. In the business is not her economically by needing to predict, how do i hold onto some different extended. Of time and make it hard to do without them. So i would argue to get very specific, services are about constantly anticipating and changing with consumer taste and needs, we can think thats awful but most of us enjoy the fact that we are catered to as consumers. Again, that can be an ugly thing, a nice thing about an anthropologist, im kind of neutral, for driven by Consumer Society how can we make that not hurt working people, how can we make that a benefit to more people than the people cashing in on selling the goods . Thank you, i really appreciate all the good work. My question you began to speak to the fact that there is social organization for many of the people and platform work. My sense is a social organization, periodic basis and mostly as you set around the task in helping how can i get this done, where is a traffic jam and so on and what is your experience, how do we move from that form of social interaction to agency that is sustainable and build sustainable interactions over time that can engage people to change economic conditions, i think thats a big challenge. There is lots of social organizations, almost in any form of work, and finds a way but we have not figured out the institutional arrangements were to give People Agency to address the Economic Issues and address the people who have the power to control the issues. Do you see any room for optimism or development along those lines because i think thats the next step that we need to figure out. Im smiling because there is a chapter on kindness of strangers is about the longterm relationship that people build and work under their building their own tools to meet and discussion forums and facebook groups to text each other and sit and skype channels together over years. These are people who will send each of the birthday gifts, send each other laptops when their laptop dies, there are deep connections beyond the social exchange in the moment about the bad employer or not. There is more of a connection, the issue to me is identity, the mix set of mental math that means people are building a fairly strong walls about who belongs and who does not. They can get via phobic very quickly and that were really serious about this work with people who are not in those of the places where being able to build on ramps that help people engage in activities together, very specific examples of different not exactly protest but petition, campaigns that workers organize that are really good finds that what workers are already doing, the biggest challenge that organized labor has a very specific model about how to organize people and it has not updated to deal with what are you doing and having independent parties, as is the case of antitrust, yellow button independent workers who are Small Businesses were colluding, that is not the right framework either. So we have not moved to a place that would say make association legal, make organizing legal and what are the ways in which you can perhaps bring labor to the table to be the facilitator of those connections, be the keeper of the key, one suggestion in the book, let union be the place for summers worker identity is held. The biggest challenge in the market is how do we verify the person is not scamming me. If you registered then you can say im with this organization, they have my identity, they can verify it for you. The business wins, theyre not having to waste their time, the worker went because theyre not having their privacy invaded in the union arguably wins because its just repressed its relevancy to the next generation of workers. Great. My question is related to this, the book mentions the social organization of these workers and it seems it enables very simple outsourcing of complex tax of managers who make multimillion dollar salaries and drop and not do anything a bunch of examples, that is a huge problem, how do we value work in the face of ghost work. That is the heart of the problem. You have to be a real jerk to say i accomplished everything on my own and so in those moments, being able to have a Culture Shift frankly, thats where the manager when they are able after somebodys help, lets think about the word outsourcing, when i asked for somebody to help me with a range of things, i cannot manage myself. And what role does that mean those people helping me out are just peripheral. Theyre not that important. So in many ways its like how do we recognize the value of somebody serving us, what is really socially culturally the biggest challenge that we have not learned i like to put it this way, if we knew the value of people serving us, then the people who take care of peoples children and parents would not be paid as fully as they are. But taking care kids is such a worthless job, clearly it takes no skill. I would really call attention to our pricing, it is not about a market value. Our lack of support of workers is not about their value, we do not yet we have yet to land, how do we value the collective contribution of individuals, aggregated to serve others. Keep that in mind, its eclectic contribution of individuals, aggregated to serve others. They are making themselves available to us, we do that too, were just compensated well for that. It does not have to be like that. Chris peterson mit admissions, really happy to see the book. On one of your first sites, there is an interesting symmetry where businesses were demanding more from attention and workers were providing labor and i thought it was interesting that it was not attention attention or labor labor and i was wondering if you could talk about that a lytic asymmetry. I purposely, i talked about said with this, i purposely put those words to resonate where we think about supply and demand and how we think about buyers and sellers. I need more training in economics where i can poke less fun at them. But trying to understand how weve come to treat labor like we talk about any other product sold has always confused me, that is a part of relationship where somebody can demand somebodys attention and somebody can supply or provide that moment of service, right now thats absolutely in asymmetry. What would it look like to turn the twosided market into an equitable exchange. If i was talking about businesses, we might have a better model and i think that could be a way forward, how do you recognized individuals acyl proprietor and really sure up what it means that this is a new main street, chambers of commerce can be involved to see that the individuals providing our sole proprietors and information workers and they are different than what weve seen before on the main street but no less valuable as providers. Just to mention there is a book in her last name she has a book called private justice, its all about the power relations. A phd student, this is fascinating. You are mentioning textile workers, im afraid my age who immigrated from canada and was so in buttoned about ten years ago you legally as part of the home working network. Im curious, the Informal Sector is about three quarters of jobs in this country probably way more because its underreported. What do you think is different about ghost work today, is that the literacy in technology and what might actually cause this if it doesnt change. That is a great question. I think about asking that question about continuity, this kind of work has not gone away, i want to have two answers, one is to say we thought of informal market were often struggling and thinking we need to formalize those, what would it look like to go in a different direction and say what it would it look like to super Economic Activity that is that one site with one employer, lets take the judgment and how bloated it is to say somebody in the informal economy. The second point i think you raise and the difference i see in this kind of work is that it is i dont want to say that its a volume issue but its so distributed in that it can happen so quickly and this is the thing that makes me most nervous is that tracing the abuse of people in the supplychain will be even more difficult than somebody i sellig on a button because they are in their homes or in settings where it would be difficult to monitor what might be happening and how they are being forced to work and thats difficult today anyhow to be able to know the supplychain left behind, who is producing the shirt im wearing or the food i eat so my hope is that we think about information work, this is the information we consume. Dont we want to know the work conditions of the people that had a hand in producing and i say that thinking with elections coming up with content for example, we would all be better served if we had a better sense of the work conditions of the people managing that information. We have time for one more question. My question relates to the fact that you pointed to a couple of solutions that say the role of the unions were social securitys that suggests there are solutions out there. The question i have is that since we know there are solutions, how do we move the culture as long as they affect things differently . That is a great question and in many ways im sorry we didnt get to california [inaudible] it has always taken Civil Society consumers, government and businesses to address this problem. Again, its not a market problem. This is a fundamental social question hell do we want to trade working people and when we hear of loved ones imagine what it would take to ensure they have a good life. I hope what it does is galvanize consumer is to say we benefit from these services. From anybody that raised their hand, they will not be likely to survive the california bill five. They said its not going to comply. And i think we all lose so we are kicking this can dow takinge road and how we come to grips with it weve moved to effectively a Service Information economy. How can we make that meaningful dignified work . Before i say thank you i just want to mention there will be two additional talks during the course. We will be talking about the book the job and hes at the Manhattan Institute from a different perspective so i hope that youll join us for those as well. Thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you all for coming. [applause] next on the tv, university of texas professor michael lind describes how democracies are being unraveled by the new class for. From the Hudson Institute, this is just under an hour. Good evening and welcome to the Hudson Institute policy center. Im the chief operating officer and id like to welcome our audience here and our cspan audience to the firstever