We are being replaced by machines. What happened to horses after the invention of the steam engine, is now happening to us. Soon our manual labor will no longer be needed and with the advance of artificial intelligence, intellectual labor will be performed by machines as well. The Institute of Human Obsolescence explores this scenario and tries to ask questions on how to re-position the role of humans, particularly how to cope with a labor-market dominated by machines.

After our first exploration extracting value from what we refer as ¨biological labor¨, we are starting a new research path towards understanding data-production as a form of labor. Human-generated data is a resource already extracted by companies like Google and Facebook producing vast amounts of capital. Why aren’t we, the data-workers, capitalizing from it? If even jobless workers are generating capital by producing data, would we accept the deal of giving away our data in exchange for a Data Basic Income?