Paper short abstract

This paper examines how “good work” is redefined in the age of AI through inter-objective relations between digital tools, platforms, and labour. Drawing on ethnography with remote IT workers in India, it shows how "LLM epistemologies" reshape "understanding" as a practice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how “good work” is understood in the age of artificial intelligence by focusing on how understanding as a practice is produced through inter-objective relations. Interobjectivity is approached as the shared reality that emerges from relations between digital tools, human labour practices, and platform logics, where objects, infrastructures, and market systems actively participate in shaping meaning, value, and subjectivity (Latour 1994, 2005; Polanyi 2018; Stiegler 1998, 2019). I argue that these inter-objective relations reorganise understandings of “good work” by transforming both the division of labour and the division of values.

Drawing on ethnographic research with remote IT workers in India, this paper develops how the triad of AI, platforms, and human labour reconfigures (moral) understanding(s) of autonomy, care, and dignity. The aim of the ethnography is to demonstrate how computational models of “understanding,” developed within AI practices, circulate beyond technical domains and are taken up in everyday practices between home and work.

Engaging critically with the debates on “pragmatic genealogy” (Queloz 2021), the paper introduces an ethnographic intervention that situates “understanding” as practice within lived socio-material worlds of remote workers. I argue that “LLM epistemologies” contribute to the formation of everyday practices of “understanding” that shape the morality through which remote workers come to judge what counts as good, responsible, or meaningful work. Lastly, this paper argues how emerging technologies open new pathways for understanding “to understand” work and morality by embedding computational epistemologies into everyday life and what it could mean for [H]umans in a polarised world?