The AI for Social Impact Seminar Series brings together researchers and thought leaders from a variety of fields to explore the diverse applications of artificial intelligence for a societal benefit. Through the series, the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence aims to inspire new ideas and collaborations and to identify novel approaches that can advance discovery in the field at Penn State and beyond.
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Upcoming Events
Join Dana Calacci, assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, for an upcoming talk as part of CSRAI's AI for Social Impact Seminar Series. This lecture is free and open to the Penn State community.
About the Talk
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.
About the Speaker
Dana Calacci is an assistant professor at Penn State studying the social, technical, and legal impacts of datafication and AI on communities—especially workers. Through collaborations like the Workers Algorithm Observatory, which she co-directs, Dana designs and deploys technologies that help communities investigate how AI, new platforms, and surveillance affect their lives. Before joining Penn State, Dana was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2023 and a B.S. in computer science from Northeastern University in 2015. Dana also has experience as a startup co-founder and mixed-media artist. Her work has been featured in NPR’s Radiolab, Gizmodo, Wired, Reuters, The Atlantic’s CityLab, The New York Times, and other major publications.
About the AI for Social Impact Seminar Series
The AI for Social Impact Seminar Series brings together researchers and thought leaders from a variety of fields to explore the diverse applications of artificial intelligence for a societal benefit. Through the series, the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence aims to inspire new ideas and collaborations and to identify novel approaches that can advance discovery in the field at Penn State and beyond.