2015/04/17 by Min Kyung Lee, Daniel Kusbit, Evan Metsky +1 · 7 citations
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
paper · doi:10.1145/2702123.2702548
openalex publication_date 2015/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Software algorithms are changing how people work in an ever-growing number of fields, managing distributed human workers at a large scale. In these work settings, human jobs are assigned, optimized, and evaluated through algorithms and tracked data. We explore the impact of this algorithmic, data-driven management on human workers and work practices in the context of Uber and Lyft, new ridesharing services. Our findings from a qualitative study describe how drivers responded when algorithms assigned work, provided informational support, and evaluated their performance, and how drivers used online forums to socially make sense of the algorithm features. Implications and future work are discussed.