Asian Labor Futures Podcast

Dear friends,

The current massive oil disruption has exposed dynamics in Asian politics and workers’ power. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, mass movements recently proved they could topple entrenched authoritarians, yet they now struggle to stop fuel price hikes. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, experiences from decades of working within parliamentarian politics are forcing governments to internalize the costs of the crisis.

In this piece, I examine the “warp and weft” of Asian labor politics contrasting the street power with the institutional anchor of the workers, and why the future of the region depends on synthesizing the two.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: After the Uprisings

In South Asia, social movements were powerful enough to topple dictators but are now institutionally weak to stop gas price hikes because these are backed by IMF-mandated austerity.

Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya movement forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee. Yet, in March 2026, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake—the very man many hoped would champion the poor—raised fuel prices by a third and reintroduced QR-code fuel rationing.

Why? Sri Lanka is trapped in the post-revolutionary ‘democracy’. Dissanayake’s 2024 two-thirds parliamentary majority gave him immense democratic legitimacy. Because his party, the NPP, was the political beneficiary of the uprising, people are struggling to strike against a "people’s government" that is currently using its legitimacy to enforce IMF-mandated austerity.

Bangladesh follows a similar logic. The 2024 student uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina proved that mass mobilization can bring down entrenched power. But in the aftermath, the energy has been absorbed into constitutional battles.

The government introduced rationing on March 6, then quietly lifted it on March 15 before the end of Ramadan. The fuel crisis is producing localized rage—gas station workers attacked or killed in fuel thefts—and queues stretching for kilometers, yet there is no coordinated response from labor. This is because, under Hasina, most major unions were appendages of the state, the Awami League. When the regime fell, those labor structures collapsed or went into hiding.

Philippines and Indonesia: Keep the Rage Burning

The Philippines is seeing the most organized resistance in the region right now. After President Marcos declared a National Energy Emergency on March 24, transport groups launched nationwide tigil-pasada: transport strikes. The No to Oil Price Hike coalition—uniting jeepney drivers, motorcycle taxi riders, tricycle operators, and platform workers—took to the streets with structural demands: wage increases and the repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law and the TRAIN (The TRAIN Law (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion) Law.

The 1998 Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Act dismantled the stabilization funds that once buffered pump prices, transferring control entirely to a handful of large oil firms. By 2025, jeepney drivers were spending an estimated 60% of their daily earnings on fuel alone. Workers are not just asking for temporary relief; they are contesting the very rules of the market.

Last September, I wrote about the rage of youth in Indonesia—an uprising symbolized by Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery rider killed during a protest in Jakarta. The protests began over lawmakers awarding themselves housing allowances nearly ten times the Jakarta minimum wage, but Affan’s death made the economic stakes of the working class visceral and undeniable. In that piece, I asked: what does the future hold for enraged Indonesian youth? This crisis is beginning to answer that question.

That uprising forced the Indonesian government to internalize the cost of ignoring workers. The Prabowo government has pledged no increases for subsidized fuel in 2026, absorbing the fiscal blow through cuts to ministry spending and a new coal export tax — even as the deficit approaches its legal ceiling of 3% of GDP. In a region where governments are passing every cost directly to workers, Indonesia is holding the line.

Why? Prabowo is not just afraid of another Affan Kurniawan. Organized labor’s role as a political agent has forced the state to internalize social stability as a non-negotiable cost. That is what institutional power looks like when it works. Not just the capacity to mobilize, but the capacity to have already changed the rules of the game.

The ‘Ungovernable’ and the ‘Indispensable’

What we are witnessing across Asia is not a series of disconnected crises, but interconnected struggles.

The uprisings in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh proved that when the politics becomes a machine for its own survival, it does no longer serve the people. These movements opened the door to the future, and they did not need to ask for any permission. The power is theirs to begin with.

The civil society and organized labor in the Philippines and Indonesia represent indispensable political actor that occupies that open space. While a mass uprising can topple a leader, it is the organizational muscle of transport unions and platform worker coalitions that keep the government in check from sliding back into the old logic of the IMF.

These two models are the warp and weft of Asian labor politics. Without the explosion of the street, the institutional work remains trapped in the illusion of political participation. But without the institutional anchor, the explosion eventually dissipates into a vacuum filled up by the elites and technocrats.

The political future, then, cannot be made in either the street or the union hall. It is made in their synthesis. It is the capacity to be both ungovernable in the face of injustice and indispensable in the work of governance.

In solidarity,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

In my last piece, I wrote about Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan and framed their technical failures as a strategic opening for workers. I want to stay with this a little longer, because that technological limit is telling us something important about what “artificial intelligence” actually is, and what workers actually do.

A book I’ve been reading, Ways of Being by James Bridle, opens with a provocation: intelligence is not what we think it is. We’ve built AI on a narrow idea of what minds do: calculating, optimizing, processing symbols. But Bridle argues this image was always incomplete. Intelligence doesn’t happen inside a brain; it happens between a body and a world.

I want to use that as a jumping point for rethinking solidarity, not as feelings or a posture, but as a form of social infrastructure.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Collective Knowledge that Machines (Fail to) Replicate

Driving is one of the most complex tasks humans perform, yet it feels effortless to most of us. It’s nearly impossible to replicate in a machine. There’s a technical name for this: the Moravec paradox. What is easiest for us is hardest for machines, and vice versa.

Driving is a relational activity: reading the slight hesitation of a motorbike about to cut across your lane, sensing the rhythm of a street that slows at certain hours, knowing from experience that the puddle on this corner is deeper than it looks in the rainy season. This knowledge lives in the relationship between a body and a place, built over years of moving through it. It cannot be cleanly extracted and fed into a training dataset.

Yet workers are mislabeled “unskilled,” a classification with a long history, from the factory to the platform economy, of management taking exactly this kind of knowledge and placing it up the chain of command. What remains with the workers gets reclassified as simple execution requiring no particular intelligence. The robotaxi is the same story, albeit unfinished, played out on the street.

And where the machine still falls short, tech companies now recruit people who desperately need income to close the gap, training algorithms in real-life conditions, on poverty wages, so the machine can eventually replace them too.

What Workers Build Within the Entanglement

I’ve often felt a disconnect between the reality I see on the ground and calls for “full automation” or “post-work” futures coming from some corners of the Western left. These are important political horizons, but they can obscure the immediate question facing workers who are already inside the system and cannot simply opt out.

But the delivery riders I work with don’t have that option. By economic necessity, they are inside the relationship with the machine—the app, the algorithm, the gamification system. The question for them is not whether to engage with technology, but what to build within that entanglement.

Workers are not jut redefining themselves in the process. They are building something inside these platforms that the algorithm never intended and cannot control. This isn’t just about collective bargaining; it’s about workers coming to know one another, recognizing that the social world the algorithm depends on is actually ours.

The routing algorithms that guide platform logistics are built on the accumulated navigational intelligence of thousands of workers. This is collective labor in its purest form. And it raises a clear political demand: what is collectively produced must be collectively owned. The moment we begin to claim that knowledge together, we reclaim our “world-making rights.”

What This Means for Solidarity Building

Building collective power from within is difficult. Not just strategically, but subjectively. Platforms are designed to deplete the very capacities that organizing depends on: the desire to connect, the capacity for trust.

What we can do as movement builders is support workers' initiatives that start small and molecular: a mutual aid project or a savings circle. These are the first bricks of a solidarity infrastructure. This is similar to what scholars Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange call thick solidarity: building from workers' actual, embodied positions, across real differences in their conditions, led by those most directly inside the machine.

Unlike thin digital connections designed to keep us isolated, thick solidarity creates recurring obligations, shared risk, and belonging that doesn't disappear when accounts are deactivated.

One framework I’ve found generative comes from the US-based Building Movement Project, which uses scaffolding as a central metaphor. Scaffolding is the support system that makes it possible to build something larger than ourselves. Not the final structure, but what protects our collective energy while we’re building it. It’s what moves us from constant reaction toward shared governance and lasting power.

Platform worker movements desperately need this kind of bridge between current capacity and actual need. Between what capital permits and what justice requires. And we should be honest with ourselves: what we’re building in the meantime may not look pretty, but that’s ok.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

In my last piece, I wrote about Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan and framed their technical failures as a strategic opening for workers. I want to stay with this a little longer, because that technological limit is telling us something important about what “artificial intelligence” actually is, and what workers actually do.

A book I’ve been reading, Ways of Being by James Bridle, opens with a provocation: intelligence is not what we think it is. We’ve built AI on a narrow idea of what minds do: calculating, optimizing, processing symbols. But Bridle argues this image was always incomplete. Intelligence doesn’t happen inside a brain; it happens between a body and a world.

I want to use that as a jumping point for rethinking solidarity, not as feelings or a posture, but as a form of social infrastructure.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Collective Knowledge that Machines (Fail to) Replicate

Driving is one of the most complex tasks humans perform, yet it feels effortless to most of us. It’s nearly impossible to replicate in a machine. There’s a technical name for this: the Moravec paradox. What is easiest for us is hardest for machines, and vice versa.

Driving is a relational activity: reading the slight hesitation of a motorbike about to cut across your lane, sensing the rhythm of a street that slows at certain hours, knowing from experience that the puddle on this corner is deeper than it looks in the rainy season. This knowledge lives in the relationship between a body and a place, built over years of moving through it. It cannot be cleanly extracted and fed into a training dataset.

Yet workers are mislabeled “unskilled,” a classification with a long history, from the factory to the platform economy, of management taking exactly this kind of knowledge and placing it up the chain of command. What remains with the workers gets reclassified as simple execution requiring no particular intelligence. The robotaxi is the same story, albeit unfinished, played out on the street.

And where the machine still falls short, tech companies now recruit people who desperately need income to close the gap, training algorithms in real-life conditions, on poverty wages, so the machine can eventually replace them too.

What Workers Build Within the Entanglement

I’ve often felt a disconnect between the reality I see on the ground and calls for “full automation” or “post-work” futures coming from some corners of the Western left. These are important political horizons, but they can obscure the immediate question facing workers who are already inside the system and cannot simply opt out.

But the delivery riders I work with don’t have that option. By economic necessity, they are inside the relationship with the machine—the app, the algorithm, the gamification system. The question for them is not whether to engage with technology, but what to build within that entanglement.

Workers are not jut redefining themselves in the process. They are building something inside these platforms that the algorithm never intended and cannot control. This isn’t just about collective bargaining; it’s about workers coming to know one another, recognizing that the social world the algorithm depends on is actually ours.

The routing algorithms that guide platform logistics are built on the accumulated navigational intelligence of thousands of workers. This is collective labor in its purest form. And it raises a clear political demand: what is collectively produced must be collectively owned. The moment we begin to claim that knowledge together, we reclaim our “world-making rights.”

What This Means for Solidarity Building

Building collective power from within is difficult. Not just strategically, but subjectively. Platforms are designed to deplete the very capacities that organizing depends on: the desire to connect, the capacity for trust.

What we can do as movement builders is support workers' initiatives that start small and molecular: a mutual aid project or a savings circle. These are the first bricks of a solidarity infrastructure. This is similar to what scholars Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange call thick solidarity: building from workers' actual, embodied positions, across real differences in their conditions, led by those most directly inside the machine.

Unlike thin digital connections designed to keep us isolated, thick solidarity creates recurring obligations, shared risk, and belonging that doesn't disappear when accounts are deactivated.

One framework I’ve found generative comes from the US-based Building Movement Project, which uses scaffolding as a central metaphor. Scaffolding is the support system that makes it possible to build something larger than ourselves. Not the final structure, but what protects our collective energy while we’re building it. It’s what moves us from constant reaction toward shared governance and lasting power.

Platform worker movements desperately need this kind of bridge between current capacity and actual need. Between what capital permits and what justice requires. And we should be honest with ourselves: what we’re building in the meantime may not look pretty, but that’s ok.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

It may be time to talk about robotaxis, or “driverless” taxi service. Not as a tech trend to get you excited, but as the next front in a battle that platform workers across Asia have been fighting for over a decade.

The struggles of ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in China and across Asia are still unfolding. Still raw.

Yet, the rapid rise of robotaxis now threatens to upend this already precarious workforce once again. What took more than a decade to build; nascent labor organizations among app-based drivers may face another round of disruption, destabilizing the political formations workers have painstakingly built.

I want to resist the narrative of inevitability and to encourage activists to think strategically. Our labor built the platform economy, and that history provides a map for our next moves against robotaxis.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Chinese Platform Drivers in Surviving Modes

In China, ride-hailing drivers have long worked under intense pressure to make ends meet. According to a report by the National Business Daily, multiple regions issued warnings since mid-2024 that platforms had flooded the market with overcrowded drivers. As a result, drivers’ daily revenues reportedly dropped sharply, pushing many to the brink.

A 2024 labor review compiled by an anonymous Chinese collective known as “Straw Mushroom Stewed Chicken” (草菇炖鸡), published by an international editorial group Chuang, documents what survival looks like under these condition.

In megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, male drivers have resorted to eating, drinking, and sleeping in their cars to save on rent, relying on paid bathhouses for hygiene. This gave rise to the “smelly car” trend on social media. Platforms like Didi responded with disciplinary measures and blacklisting features, rather than addressing the underlying dispatch algorithms or revenue-sharing models. At the same time, the workforce saw a threefold increase in women drivers, adding a gendered dimension to these conditions.

And still, workers pushed back. Before shutting down in mid-2025, the China Labor Bulletin's Strike Map recorded 25 driver protests in 2024 alone, nearly 40 percent of all transport and logistics collective actions that year. Drivers were organizing under crises.

Into this sitting, the robotaxis like WeRide and Apollo Go (which this article will focus on) arrived.

Robotaxis Stealing the “Rice Bowl”

Since its 2022 debut, Baidu’s Apollo Go has scaled rapidly across more than twenty Chinese cities. By early 2026, Apollo Go had begun operations in Dubai and partnered with Lyft in Europe.

Wuhan has become its primary laboratory—the first city to integrate autonomous vehicles into its highway system and urban grid at scale.

As reported by Baiguan and Chosun News, the competition is brutal. Pricing data from the Wuhan Economic Development Zone reveals an impossible competition for ride-hailing drivers. Though Apollo Go's official starting fare may be slightly higher than ride-hailing platforms, heavy subsidies and aggressive promotions have gutted actual prices. Passengers report paying 4–16 yuan for a 10-kilometer robotaxi trip, compared to 18–30 yuan with a ride hailer.

In mid-2024, a taxi company in Wuhan submitted a petition to the city’s transport bureau, accusing robotaxis of stealing the “rice bowl” (fànwǎn) of local drivers.

Among drivers, the vehicles earned a mocking nickname: shǎ luóbo : the “dumb radish.” The term refers to the machines’ awkward behavior in complex urban environments. The machines freeze at stray plastic bags, stall at confusing intersections, and create traffic jams while recalculating. Drivers joke about this. But beneath the humor lies a deeper anxiety.

For many in Wuhan, ride-hailing was already a fallback livelihood, entered after losing jobs in manufacturing or construction during earlier economic slowdowns. Ride-hail driving was the “last resort” rice bowl. Now even that is under threat.

Wuhan as a Laboratory for Our Struggle

We must look at China as a laboratory. What is happening in Wuhan is a preview, moving at unprecedented speed.

The rapid expansion of Apollo Go into the Middle East and Europe in 2026 (and WeRide into Southeast Asia) confirms that the global rollout is not a distant future. It is already here.

However, we have been here before. Our consent, given out of economic necessity, was the very fuel used to build the platform economy. Now that same dynamic is powering the shift to AI-driven autonomous vehicles.

We built these platforms with our labor. We have the right to decide whether they continue to run over our livelihoods.

As these companies go global, our resistance must do the same.

If the technology is identical in Wuhan and in Dubai, then our strategies for disruption must be shared across borders.

The strength of logistic and transport workers has always been our ability to disrupt the flow of the commodities and the city. With robotaxis even more dependent on predictable environments than human drivers ever were, this weakness in the system is an opening in ours.

The future of labor is a social struggle we have already been waging for a decade. We know this terrain. It is not too late to stop the robotaxis in their tracks.

Until next time,

Kriangsak

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

It may be time to talk about robotaxis, or “driverless” taxi service. Not as a tech trend to get you excited, but as the next front in a battle that platform workers across Asia have been fighting for over a decade.

The struggles of ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in China and across Asia are still unfolding. Still raw.

Yet, the rapid rise of robotaxis now threatens to upend this already precarious workforce once again. What took more than a decade to build; nascent labor organizations among app-based drivers may face another round of disruption, destabilizing the political formations workers have painstakingly built.

I want to resist the narrative of inevitability and to encourage activists to think strategically. Our labor built the platform economy, and that history provides a map for our next moves against robotaxis.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Chinese Platform Drivers in Surviving Modes

In China, ride-hailing drivers have long worked under intense pressure to make ends meet. According to a report by the National Business Daily, multiple regions issued warnings since mid-2024 that platforms had flooded the market with overcrowded drivers. As a result, drivers’ daily revenues reportedly dropped sharply, pushing many to the brink.

A 2024 labor review compiled by an anonymous Chinese collective known as “Straw Mushroom Stewed Chicken” (草菇炖鸡), published by an international editorial group Chuang, documents what survival looks like under these condition.

In megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, male drivers have resorted to eating, drinking, and sleeping in their cars to save on rent, relying on paid bathhouses for hygiene. This gave rise to the “smelly car” trend on social media. Platforms like Didi responded with disciplinary measures and blacklisting features, rather than addressing the underlying dispatch algorithms or revenue-sharing models. At the same time, the workforce saw a threefold increase in women drivers, adding a gendered dimension to these conditions.

And still, workers pushed back. Before shutting down in mid-2025, the China Labor Bulletin's Strike Map recorded 25 driver protests in 2024 alone, nearly 40 percent of all transport and logistics collective actions that year. Drivers were organizing under crises.

Into this sitting, the robotaxis like WeRide and Apollo Go (which this article will focus on) arrived.

Robotaxis Stealing the “Rice Bowl”

Since its 2022 debut, Baidu’s Apollo Go has scaled rapidly across more than twenty Chinese cities. By early 2026, Apollo Go had begun operations in Dubai and partnered with Lyft in Europe.

Wuhan has become its primary laboratory—the first city to integrate autonomous vehicles into its highway system and urban grid at scale.

As reported by Baiguan and Chosun News, the competition is brutal. Pricing data from the Wuhan Economic Development Zone reveals an impossible competition for ride-hailing drivers. Though Apollo Go's official starting fare may be slightly higher than ride-hailing platforms, heavy subsidies and aggressive promotions have gutted actual prices. Passengers report paying 4–16 yuan for a 10-kilometer robotaxi trip, compared to 18–30 yuan with a ride hailer.

In mid-2024, a taxi company in Wuhan submitted a petition to the city’s transport bureau, accusing robotaxis of stealing the “rice bowl” (fànwǎn) of local drivers.

Among drivers, the vehicles earned a mocking nickname: shǎ luóbo : the “dumb radish.” The term refers to the machines’ awkward behavior in complex urban environments. The machines freeze at stray plastic bags, stall at confusing intersections, and create traffic jams while recalculating. Drivers joke about this. But beneath the humor lies a deeper anxiety.

For many in Wuhan, ride-hailing was already a fallback livelihood, entered after losing jobs in manufacturing or construction during earlier economic slowdowns. Ride-hail driving was the “last resort” rice bowl. Now even that is under threat.

Wuhan as a Laboratory for Our Struggle

We must look at China as a laboratory. What is happening in Wuhan is a preview, moving at unprecedented speed.

The rapid expansion of Apollo Go into the Middle East and Europe in 2026 (and WeRide into Southeast Asia) confirms that the global rollout is not a distant future. It is already here.

However, we have been here before. Our consent, given out of economic necessity, was the very fuel used to build the platform economy. Now that same dynamic is powering the shift to AI-driven autonomous vehicles.

We built these platforms with our labor. We have the right to decide whether they continue to run over our livelihoods.

As these companies go global, our resistance must do the same.

If the technology is identical in Wuhan and in Dubai, then our strategies for disruption must be shared across borders.

The strength of logistic and transport workers has always been our ability to disrupt the flow of the commodities and the city. With robotaxis even more dependent on predictable environments than human drivers ever were, this weakness in the system is an opening in ours.

The future of labor is a social struggle we have already been waging for a decade. We know this terrain. It is not too late to stop the robotaxis in their tracks.

Until next time,

Kriangsak

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

In my last post, I wrote about the automation of housework. Naturally, that conversation led me here. To some of the most draining work many of us will ever do: raising a child.

With the recent boom in generative AI, we are seeing a rise in AI toys. It has me asking a difficult question: What does it look like to be a parent when we assign machines to perform our emotional labor?

This post is an intervention against a twisted logic—the idea that the resource-heavy 'extraction' of a data center is worth more energy and investment than the life-making labor of building a human being.

By necessity, this piece is deeply personal. It is also deeply political.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Exhaustion of Emotional Labor

During the pandemic, I spent twelve months as a full-time caregiver to my first child while my wife went back to work. At 45, the intensity was a physical shock to a Highly Sensitive Person like myself.

What I came to understand was that the real challenge came largely from managing my own feelings in order to create a desired emotional state in another human being.

This is what Arlie Hochschild famously called ‘emotional labor’.

In moments of bone-deep exhaustion, when my son demanded that I become Elmo or Cookie Monster, I had to summon that voice from somewhere inside the depletion. That deep acting, reshaping my internal state to meet his need, is precisely what makes parental care truly draining. And yet, it is also what makes it one of the most rewarding work a person can do.

When my son became a toddler, he began to mirror my internal world. When I conjured Elmo through fatigue, I was showing him that care is reciprocal, that intimacy is built from a loop of constantly building on each other’s feelings.

Parenting is not a one-way street. It is a mutual becoming.

AI-Powered Toys

Advanced AI companion robots are now marketed as if they can interact with children and grow alongside them. Industrialists are selling the idea that machines can soothe and tutor.

In a recent conversation in Interactions magazine, an AI researcher describes an “empathy deficit” at the core of current AI systems. Large language models can simulate “cognitive empathy” predicting what someone might feel based on data but they lack “affective empathy”. What it means is that they do not feel the weight of another person’s vulnerability.

I would not call that care, because caring is so much more than a performance of soothing words.

Political theorist Joan Tronto argues that care has integrity only when it completes a full cycle: caring about (noticing need), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the act itself), and care-receiving (the response that closes the loop).

When I used my Cookie Monster voice while exhausted, I was completing that loop. I noticed his need. I took responsibility. I gave care. And my son received it, and gave something back.

AI-powered toys can mimic care-giving, but they cannot care for. They do not worry about a child’s future.

This is before we even get to the privacy risks, including the recent leak of conversations between children and chatbot-powered toys made by the Mumbai-based company Miko, and broader expert warnings that children talking to ChatGPT-powered toys are being exposed to unsolicited and harmful contents.

Realistically, these toys are often just a sophisticated upgrade from a tablet—but one that demands significantly more parental supervision (see my previous post regarding the added mental load created by the digitalization of household communication).

These are real and urgent threats. But my critique of AI childcare goes further than them.

The ‘Value’ of Life-Making

There is a form of work that often goes unnamed, yet it is what keeps the world turning: the slow, quiet process of ‘making a person’. It encompasses all the unpaid, invisible efforts that happen behind the scenes—the feeding, the diaper-changing, and the exhausting labor of building emotional intelligence. It is the work of shaping a life so that, one day, that life can step out into the world.

Under our current system, this labor has always been at odds with the clock. Capitalism demands that we be efficient and productive, yet raising a human is inherently slow and inefficient.

This might explain why tech executives like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reportedly view raising a child as a “waste of energy.” To a mind obsessed with optimization, a data center is valuable because it generates economic value and profits. Childrearing is seen as a “waste” because it doesn’t produce a profit margin.

But that “waste” is exactly where the meaning of life lives. This perspective reveals a fundamental misjudgment of what the bond between a parent and child actually is.

Not all our relationships are transactional. Intimacy and co-creation are the very foundations of being human.

The question we should be asking is: who benefits from returning us to “productive” work faster? If capitalism once sought to own our working hours, it now seeks to monetize our off-the-clock intimacy.

In many parts of the world, where the friction between life-making and profit-making becomes unbearable, people are pushing back by abstaining from life-making altogether.

Until we as a society align our values with our daily practices, no amount of robots or AI can resolve these tensions. We will continue to hollow out our homes and our sense of self until we face the fact that we don't live to work; we work to sustain the 'wasteful,' beautiful labor of life-making.

Until next times,

Kiang

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear friends,

In my last post, I wrote about the automation of housework. Naturally, that conversation led me here. To some of the most draining work many of us will ever do: raising a child.

With the recent boom in generative AI, we are seeing a rise in AI toys. It has me asking a difficult question: What does it look like to be a parent when we assign machines to perform our emotional labor?

This post is an intervention against a twisted logic—the idea that the resource-heavy 'extraction' of a data center is worth more energy and investment than the life-making labor of building a human being.

By necessity, this piece is deeply personal. It is also deeply political.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Exhaustion of Emotional Labor

During the pandemic, I spent twelve months as a full-time caregiver to my first child while my wife went back to work. At 45, the intensity was a physical shock to a Highly Sensitive Person like myself.

What I came to understand was that the real challenge came largely from managing my own feelings in order to create a desired emotional state in another human being.

This is what Arlie Hochschild famously called ‘emotional labor’.

In moments of bone-deep exhaustion, when my son demanded that I become Elmo or Cookie Monster, I had to summon that voice from somewhere inside the depletion. That deep acting, reshaping my internal state to meet his need, is precisely what makes parental care truly draining. And yet, it is also what makes it one of the most rewarding work a person can do.

When my son became a toddler, he began to mirror my internal world. When I conjured Elmo through fatigue, I was showing him that care is reciprocal, that intimacy is built from a loop of constantly building on each other’s feelings.

Parenting is not a one-way street. It is a mutual becoming.

AI-Powered Toys

Advanced AI companion robots are now marketed as if they can interact with children and grow alongside them. Industrialists are selling the idea that machines can soothe and tutor.

In a recent conversation in Interactions magazine, an AI researcher describes an “empathy deficit” at the core of current AI systems. Large language models can simulate “cognitive empathy” predicting what someone might feel based on data but they lack “affective empathy”. What it means is that they do not feel the weight of another person’s vulnerability.

I would not call that care, because caring is so much more than a performance of soothing words.

Political theorist Joan Tronto argues that care has integrity only when it completes a full cycle: caring about (noticing need), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the act itself), and care-receiving (the response that closes the loop).

When I used my Cookie Monster voice while exhausted, I was completing that loop. I noticed his need. I took responsibility. I gave care. And my son received it, and gave something back.

AI-powered toys can mimic care-giving, but they cannot care for. They do not worry about a child’s future.

This is before we even get to the privacy risks, including the recent leak of conversations between children and chatbot-powered toys made by the Mumbai-based company Miko, and broader expert warnings that children talking to ChatGPT-powered toys are being exposed to unsolicited and harmful contents.

Realistically, these toys are often just a sophisticated upgrade from a tablet—but one that demands significantly more parental supervision (see my previous post regarding the added mental load created by the digitalization of household communication).

These are real and urgent threats. But my critique of AI childcare goes further than them.

The ‘Value’ of Life-Making

There is a form of work that often goes unnamed, yet it is what keeps the world turning: the slow, quiet process of ‘making a person’. It encompasses all the unpaid, invisible efforts that happen behind the scenes—the feeding, the diaper-changing, and the exhausting labor of building emotional intelligence. It is the work of shaping a life so that, one day, that life can step out into the world.

Under our current system, this labor has always been at odds with the clock. Capitalism demands that we be efficient and productive, yet raising a human is inherently slow and inefficient.

This might explain why tech executives like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reportedly view raising a child as a “waste of energy.” To a mind obsessed with optimization, a data center is valuable because it generates economic value and profits. Childrearing is seen as a “waste” because it doesn’t produce a profit margin.

But that “waste” is exactly where the meaning of life lives. This perspective reveals a fundamental misjudgment of what the bond between a parent and child actually is.

Not all our relationships are transactional. Intimacy and co-creation are the very foundations of being human.

The question we should be asking is: who benefits from returning us to “productive” work faster? If capitalism once sought to own our working hours, it now seeks to monetize our off-the-clock intimacy.

In many parts of the world, where the friction between life-making and profit-making becomes unbearable, people are pushing back by abstaining from life-making altogether.

Until we as a society align our values with our daily practices, no amount of robots or AI can resolve these tensions. We will continue to hollow out our homes and our sense of self until we face the fact that we don't live to work; we work to sustain the 'wasteful,' beautiful labor of life-making.

Until next times,

Kiang

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear Friends,

We are still living deep inside the fog of AI hype. It’s a haze that has generated enormous excitement, but also a fair share of illusions—fantasies about what’s actually possible today versus what remains decades out of reach.

These myths have spilled over into the world of robotics.

In this edition, I want to pull back the curtain on the ‘robot butler.’ We’ll look at why humanoid robots are stuck in a strange halfway state: they exist, yet they are perpetually ‘not quite ready.’ We’ll also explore why the automation of housework, at least as it’s being sold to us, is really just a new form of unpaid labor.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Personal Is Political

Guess how excited I was the first time I saw a picture of a robot folding laundry?

Honestly, I was more thrilled by that single image than by watching an entire army of Unitree robots perform martial arts at the 2026 Lunar New Year Festival. As a stay-at-home dad, nothing would make my day more than offloading the “dull and boring work”—the loading, unloading, and folding—so I could spend that time reading books to or playing with my kids.

But that pipe dream burst quickly. The truth is, humanoid robots capable of completing household chores don’t exist yet. They struggle outside of "strictly controlled environments," which is really just code for a home without humans.

Take the Figure robot, for example, the humanoid robot named one of the best innovations of 2025 by Time Magazine.

Even though Figure 03 is technically “available” to buy, it is still fully tele-operated . Yes, they require humans to operate them (ridiculous). Yes, they rely on household data to train them further (obnoxious). And no, thank you, for me.

In an interview with Time Magazine, the CEO of Figure said it would take almost two years for the robots to be ready and at least ten years before robots become common in our homes. Why all the noise now?

This is not simply overpromising to attract the trillions of dollars needed to speed up development. The public rollout of these machines has become part of the strategy of robotization itself.

It resembles what Leopoldina Fortunati and colleagues call the “roboid” phase of social robots: a long but increasingly normalized period between prototyping and full commercialization. With a few exceptions, like the Onero H1 (which is also considered not a viable product by one observer), they exist in an in-between stage, constantly needing more data mining and undergoing training, much like today’s generative AI.

Even so, this is precisely where the conversation needs to begin. Our homes are too important to be shaped solely by the priorities of tech startups, especially when the question of whether housework can, or should, be automated remains highly political.

Housework Technology: The Historical Afterthought

Feminist scholars like Judy Wajcman have long argued that domestic technology is treated as an afterthought in the history of innovation. Machines like rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, washers, and dryers have existed for generations. Yet technologies associated with cooking and cleaning—work historically relegated to women—have seen remarkably little transformation, limited mostly to incremental upgrades.

Even when domestic technologies advance, the so-called Cowan paradox remains: housework does not shrink. Instead, it expands. As the authors of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time observe, innovation in the domestic sphere has tended to follow technical constraints and profit incentives rather than the actual needs of users. More often, innovation favors autonomous “leisure” activities over the persistent drudgery of care.

Houseworkers, mostly women, are often expected to use their “freed up” time to perform more intensive emotional labor. In short, household technologies have not reduced the total time spent on daily domestic work. While humanoid robots may be years away, the domestic sphere is already partially mechanized. Over the past few decades, the “digital revolution” has reshaped home life through software, algorithms, and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Consequently, houseworkers now carry a heavier mental load in organizing and managing these household devices.

Unpaid Training as the New Care Work

The robotization of the housework does more than just ask us to surrender our privacy to enrich Silicon Valley; it demands that domestic workers and caregivers perform a new form of invisible, unpaid labor.

Across the globe, the lion’s share of reproductive labor falls to unpaid household members, including unmarried daughters and daughters-in-law, as well as exploited migrant workers. In a scenario set out by the big tech, these workers will become the ones “tweaking” and “fine-tuning” the machines, constantly picking up the slack where sensors fail. Instead of a “butler” robot that serves us, we have become the “tech support” staff for the hardware.

In the 1970s, the Wages for Housework movement emerged from the feminist struggle to demand compensation for reproductive labor. Given these new trends of unpaid workers training and maintaining AI, it is only just that houseworkers revive this demand for the digital age.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear Friends,

We are still living deep inside the fog of AI hype. It’s a haze that has generated enormous excitement, but also a fair share of illusions—fantasies about what’s actually possible today versus what remains decades out of reach.

These myths have spilled over into the world of robotics.

In this edition, I want to pull back the curtain on the ‘robot butler.’ We’ll look at why humanoid robots are stuck in a strange halfway state: they exist, yet they are perpetually ‘not quite ready.’ We’ll also explore why the automation of housework, at least as it’s being sold to us, is really just a new form of unpaid labor.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Personal Is Political

Guess how excited I was the first time I saw a picture of a robot folding laundry?

Honestly, I was more thrilled by that single image than by watching an entire army of Unitree robots perform martial arts at the 2026 Lunar New Year Festival. As a stay-at-home dad, nothing would make my day more than offloading the “dull and boring work”—the loading, unloading, and folding—so I could spend that time reading books to or playing with my kids.

But that pipe dream burst quickly. The truth is, humanoid robots capable of completing household chores don’t exist yet. They struggle outside of "strictly controlled environments," which is really just code for a home without humans.

Take the Figure robot, for example, the humanoid robot named one of the best innovations of 2025 by Time Magazine.

Even though Figure 03 is technically “available” to buy, it is still fully tele-operated . Yes, they require humans to operate them (ridiculous). Yes, they rely on household data to train them further (obnoxious). And no, thank you, for me.

In an interview with Time Magazine, the CEO of Figure said it would take almost two years for the robots to be ready and at least ten years before robots become common in our homes. Why all the noise now?

This is not simply overpromising to attract the trillions of dollars needed to speed up development. The public rollout of these machines has become part of the strategy of robotization itself.

It resembles what Leopoldina Fortunati and colleagues call the “roboid” phase of social robots: a long but increasingly normalized period between prototyping and full commercialization. With a few exceptions, like the Onero H1 (which is also considered not a viable product by one observer), they exist in an in-between stage, constantly needing more data mining and undergoing training, much like today’s generative AI.

Even so, this is precisely where the conversation needs to begin. Our homes are too important to be shaped solely by the priorities of tech startups, especially when the question of whether housework can, or should, be automated remains highly political.

Housework Technology: The Historical Afterthought

Feminist scholars like Judy Wajcman have long argued that domestic technology is treated as an afterthought in the history of innovation. Machines like rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, washers, and dryers have existed for generations. Yet technologies associated with cooking and cleaning—work historically relegated to women—have seen remarkably little transformation, limited mostly to incremental upgrades.

Even when domestic technologies advance, the so-called Cowan paradox remains: housework does not shrink. Instead, it expands. As the authors of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time observe, innovation in the domestic sphere has tended to follow technical constraints and profit incentives rather than the actual needs of users. More often, innovation favors autonomous “leisure” activities over the persistent drudgery of care.

Houseworkers, mostly women, are often expected to use their “freed up” time to perform more intensive emotional labor. In short, household technologies have not reduced the total time spent on daily domestic work. While humanoid robots may be years away, the domestic sphere is already partially mechanized. Over the past few decades, the “digital revolution” has reshaped home life through software, algorithms, and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Consequently, houseworkers now carry a heavier mental load in organizing and managing these household devices.

Unpaid Training as the New Care Work

The robotization of the housework does more than just ask us to surrender our privacy to enrich Silicon Valley; it demands that domestic workers and caregivers perform a new form of invisible, unpaid labor.

Across the globe, the lion’s share of reproductive labor falls to unpaid household members, including unmarried daughters and daughters-in-law, as well as exploited migrant workers. In a scenario set out by the big tech, these workers will become the ones “tweaking” and “fine-tuning” the machines, constantly picking up the slack where sensors fail. Instead of a “butler” robot that serves us, we have become the “tech support” staff for the hardware.

In the 1970s, the Wages for Housework movement emerged from the feminist struggle to demand compensation for reproductive labor. Given these new trends of unpaid workers training and maintaining AI, it is only just that houseworkers revive this demand for the digital age.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com

Dear Friends,

Following the previous post on companion robots, I stay with the issue of robots and workers in South Korea. This time, I return to a more familiar terrain: the introduction of robots on the shop floor and the struggle of unions to contest them.

As Hyundai unveiled its humanoid Atlas at CES 2026, co-developed with its subsidiary Boston Dynamics, the demonstration gave us more than enough to feel uneasy.

The response from the Hyundai Motor Union (HMU) was unequivocal: not a single robot without a labor-management agreement. This position reflects a long-standing confrontation between capital and labor, and it should not be mistaken for resistance to technology itself.

The issue is not whether workers are willing to coexist with robots.

Rather, the dispute signals a deeper concern over governance at the point of production. The question is whether technological change will be collectively negotiated or imposed unilaterally.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Labor Automation: Past and Present

From the workers’ perspective, allowing management to introduce robots on the shop floor at will represents a decisive shift in the balance of power in industrial relations. In a context already shaped by platformization, extreme casualization, and weakened labor protections, unchecked automation threatens to further erode workers’ collective power.

Seen this way, the debate over humanoid robots at Hyundai is not about human-robot interaction. It is about consent, power, and whether technological change will once again be mobilized as part of a broader strategy to discipline labor. This is a pattern with a long and instructive history in South Korea.

By insisting that “not a single robot” may enter the production line without prior agreement, the union has invoked contractual clauses requiring management to notify workers of any new technology. In doing so, it has reactivated a regulatory mechanism: an attempt to slow down technological change through collective bargaining.

Unlike the stationary robotic arms introduced in the 1990s, humanoid robots represent a qualitative shift: their mobility and dexterity. Workers recognize that this is not merely about job loss, but about the reorganization of work itself—one in which humans may increasingly be asked to switch the role with the machines.

To understand why the union draws such a firm line, we need to situate the current confrontation within a longer history of labor struggle and technological discipline.

Automation and Labor Militancy

As labor historian Beverly Silver argues in Forces of Labor, waves of labor unrest tend to follow capital’s spatial and technological fixes. South Korea in the 1980s exemplified this dynamic.

During the late 1980s—a period dubbed by Hagen Koo the “Great Workers’ Struggle”—the Korean state and capital launched coordinated offensives: violent military-style crackdowns were deployed to suppress militancy, and automation was introduced alongside efforts to flexibilize employment.

The unrest itself was shaped by global restructuring. Automotive production had shifted from the United States and Japan to South Korea, driven by the expectation that an authoritarian developmental state would guarantee labor discipline. Instead, workers rose up.

In 1987, more than 20,000 Hyundai workers occupied company plants, demanding independent and democratic unions. They forced Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-yung, to recognize their union. A dramatic reversal for a man who once declared there would be no union until the day he died.

It was in this context that Hyundai Robot Industry was established in 1988, explicitly aimed at reducing reliance on a militant workforce.

Automation was a strategic response to labor power.

Labor militancy, then, was both a cause and a consequence of automation. Capital learned that neither relocation nor repression alone could contain workers’ resistance. Technology became embedded within a broader political project to reassert managerial control.

Seen historically, robots have repeatedly entered the shop floor as instruments in struggles over power, discipline, and the terms of employment.

The Battles Are In the Society

Fast forward to 2026. Workers are once again facing a new cycle of capital offensives. This time it is amplified by societal hype around robots and AI.

Observers of South Korean unions might dismiss the HMU as a “labor aristocracy”, as it is a union that still retains the privilege of collective bargaining. Many smaller, independent unions have far less leverage to negotiate over the introduction of robots.

With the enactment of South Korea’s so-called “Yellow Envelope Law,” workers’ ability to challenge management decisions, including the deployment of robots, will become a litmus test for the recently reformed law itself.

In my view, the struggle over who governs technology cannot be fought on the shop floor, or in the “workplace” alone, whatever that means in a given context.

The future of work both in South Korea and across Asia will be shaped by what society is willing to contest and negotiate.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com