Autonomy Work: Personhood, Expertise, and Activism of Disabled AI Data Workers in China

Abstract

This dissertation examines the labor and life of disabled workers in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) data annotation programs. The study draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over three years, with disabled activists, disabled workers, employment advocates, tech company staff, and government officials. This is supplemented by five years of my professional experience in disability nonprofits. My primary field site was a disabled people-led NGO founded in 2006, which I refer to as ENABLE. In recent years, ENABLE has developed numerous projects with tech companies to hire people with visual and physical impairments as data annotators for AI systems and to design assistive technologies for the community.

In ENABLE’s case, what appears to be a familiar story of capitalist exploitation of disabled people turns out to be, instead, a story about the struggles of disabled Chinese people over different ways of being, living, and relating. I use the term “autonomy work” to describe disabled people’s labor to make “autonomous” machines (zidonghua) (Chapter 1), build an “autonomous” life (zizhu shenghuo) through work (Chapters 2 & 3), and design tools for “independent” navigation (duli chuxing) (Chapter 4).

I argue that disabled activists seek to construct greater autonomy for their community by reconfiguring social relations in and around technology. I call this mechanism “rerouting.” Instead of a complete departure from asymmetrical power relations, my interlocutors “reroute” the pathways between different human and non-human nodes without changing the nodes per se. They do so within the sociotechnical systems they build, the technological institutions they navigate, the kinship structures they seek to remake through tech work, and the physical terrain they navigate with assistive devices, all in pursuit of multiple forms of autonomy. “Rerouting” contributes to the rich scholarship on the intersection of disability and technoscience by highlighting the effects of disabled people’s unorthodox knowledge and practices that bend the world towards disabled bodies and minds. Furthermore, it specifies a key mechanism through which these effects are realized. Disabled people hack lives, build access, and improvise affordances by reorganizing the pathways between objects, bodies, and environments that were originally designed with other intentions.

With deep knowledge and lived experience of the social issues they advocate for, disabled activists in China approach technology as a puzzle piece, not a magic bullet. They make technology useful for their lives, work, and activism by returning the technical to the social. Rather than displacing the slow work of social movements with neoliberal techno-solutionism, I show that this community-driven technological engagement is part of a larger effort to sustain that very slow work within a shifting political environment.