Do The AI “Guys” Get Paid More?

There’s a sort of fascinating study out there, being reported on now, that begs a number of questions about automation in the workforce.

Anothony Cuthbertson at The Independent reports that a team at the University of Limerick created a trial project to simulate the remuneration of digital AI workers, and found that those presenting as male “earned” more than those with female characteristics, which you might presume to be mostly voice, and avatar. After all, AI doesn’t have bodies. Agents don’t have physical characteristics. But they do have voices. And they can be given names. That’s part of what’s so abundantly weird about all of this. None of us humans are ready for colleagues and co-workers who are “there” and personified, but not, as you’d say, born of woman.

Anyway, Cuthbertson’s reporting contends that the “male” Ais get “paid more” than the “women.”

What does it mean to have this kind of glass ceiling? Especially when companies don’t typically “pay” a digital workforce at all?

Payday for Robots

In a key sense, AI entities, whether roboticized or not, are like animals. They can do “work,” but they can’t really “get paid” in any meaningful sense. Money doesn’t mean anything to them, albeit in different ways: while the animals lack the comprehension of money as a concept, the AI entities lack the needs to be ameliorated with the money, although surely, as smart “people,” they can find ways to spend the money.

It turns out, though, that outside of this study, “paying” AI agents typically means allocating them resources: partitioned data storage, a virtual machine or container, an operating system, a browser, a stateful record. Anything like that can be “pay” for an agent, according to the ROI that the company expects.

But in the study, the researchers doled out actual funds. Here’s how the reporting explains it:

Getting Paid by the User

That makes things a lot clearer for anyone who would read the Independent coverage and wonder, they got paid how, exactly?

Clear as mud?