AI for Social Impact Seminar Series: Dana Calacci

"How AI is Reshaping Your Paycheck: Personalized Wages in the Inference Economy"

AI systems are not just transforming the way we do our work—they are also quietly reshaping how we get paid. Instead
of predictable wages or collective agreements, AI systems allow firms to set workers’ pay dynamically using opaque and
individualized inferences drawn from personal data. Building on critical scholarship examining surveillance wages and algorithmic
pay discrimination in the workplace, this talk situates these practices within a broader shift: AI’s role in fragmenting labor,
individualizing risk, and tightening employer control over the wage relationship. To understand how this plays out on the ground,
Calacci will share preliminary empirical evidence from a large-scale dataset built in collaboration with rideshare workers and
organizers. Their analysis reveals how platforms appear to optimize workers’ pay in real time in ways that undermine the principle
of equal pay for equal work. Left unchecked, these systems threaten to deepen worker precarity, weaken collective power,
and normalize a logic of wage-setting that has already begun spreading beyond the gig economy. To address these risks, she
will discuss emerging policy and design interventions that are grounded in transparency, collective data rights, and algorithmic
accountability. She will share some of the challenges they’ve faced in translating their work to advocacy and action, and discuss
how these interventions might help restore worker agency in an era where pay is no longer negotiated, but inferred.