Who Asked for This?

Ifeoma Ajunwa has a test for every new AI product: who asked for this? Her guess is a meeting with no women in the room.

Ifeoma is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory, a sociologist, and the author of The Quantified Worker. She's also Mara's friend, which is why the first few minutes are Mara bragging and Ifeoma tearing up behind her glasses. Logan had to duck out partway through, so most of this one is the two of them.

The story starts in a grad seminar on mass incarceration where the speaker never mentioned a single woman. Ifeoma wrote "what about the women?" in her notes and circled it three times. Years later, interviewing people coming out of prison, she kept hearing the same line: I hate computers. They weren't afraid of the technology. They'd figured out that the online application was the gatekeeper, and that a red light from the hiring software meant no human ever saw them.

That's the thread she pulls through the whole conversation. Employers used to buy your time and your labor. Now they also take your data, from keystroke counts to the vest that records how a warehouse worker lifts a box, and they pay the same wage. Ifeoma calls it captured capital, and she thinks women's hesitancy about AI at work is a rational response to it. Why feed data to a tool that can be used to replace you, when a man doing the same thing gets called tech savvy and you get told you need a machine to think?

From there it goes bigger. Afrofuturism as a way to govern AI. Ubuntu, and why "human beings don't exist in a vacuum" belongs in a regulation. The Kenyan workers paid under $2 an hour to make ChatGPT safe, and why "it's Kenyan workers today, but in the future it's going to be all of us." Then Ifeoma retells Derrick Bell's Space Traders, the story where aliens offer America untold riches in exchange for its Black citizens, and gives it two endings Bell didn't write. Rapid fire ends with Octavia Butler and a data center drinking the Savannah River.

The doc. Before you say yes to the AI tool at work: seven questions from this episode, with timestamps, a plain-words version for meeting notetakers, and an email you can copy to your manager. Free to copy and share. Read it on the site or open the Google Doc.

Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine. We want your voice in future episodes.

In this episode

• 00:00 Cold open: "What meeting was this idea pitched in?"

• 00:30 Mara's brag, and why Ifeoma is glad she's wearing glasses

• 03:26 What womansplaining means to her: women taking back the reins

• 05:08 "What about the women?" The seminar note that started everything

• 07:06 "I hate computers": how AI hiring became a gatekeeper for the formerly incarcerated

• 12:05 Limitless worker surveillance, bossware, and the vest that trains the robot

• 17:00 Captured capital, and why women's AI hesitancy is rational

• 19:55 "Who asked for this?" Women should be writing AI policy and founding AI companies

• 23:19 The San Francisco billboard: "She'll never ask for a raise"

• 26:13 Afrofuturism, Ubuntu, and canaries in the coal mine

• 31:44 The Kenyan workers who made ChatGPT safe

• 34:00 Space Traders, retold with two new endings

• 38:08 Rapid fire: imagination, Ruha Benjamin, and what school is for

• 39:31 Fiction, Octavia Butler, and how to make time out of thin air

• 42:27 Don't repeat the industrial revolution: the Savannah River data center

About Ifeoma Ajunwa

Ifeoma Ajunwa is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships, and founding director of Emory's AI and Future of Work Program. She holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia and an LLM from Yale, and she is the author of The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has testified before Congress, received the NSF CAREER Award, and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Find her at ifeomaajunwa.com.

Resources mentioned

• Ifeoma Ajunwa, The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Artificial Intelligence, Afrofuturism, and Economic Justice," 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1267 (2024)

• Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford & Jason Schultz, "Limitless Worker Surveillance," 105 California Law Review 735 (2017)

• Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The Modern Day Scarlet Letter," 83 Fordham Law Review (2015)

• Derrick Bell, "The Space Traders," from Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

• Sabelo Mhlambi, "From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical and Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance" (Carr Center Discussion Paper 2020-009)

• Ulises A. Mejias & Nick Couldry, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024)

• Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME (2023)

• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Kindred

• Emory Law, AI and Future of Work Program

• ifeomaajunwa.com