The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.
Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)
Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.
Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
A primary way academia sells "impact" of research is through moral outrage. Since academic impact, ought in most cases, be relatively fringe and internal to academic priorities -- the demand from society/government to contrive some means to assess its value has lead to an explosion of "morality washing" connecting some topic of investigation to some assumed moral value society is supposed to have.
Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.
That is colonialism. It's not AI colonialism, but it's a generic rich people colonialism that AI, and other industries, are taking advantage of, that causes such a wage disparity to exist in the first place.
> People don't even know about their fellow co-workers.
This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.
It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
This is interesting to me because my experience with larger companies has been the opposite: The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments. Remote workers were pressured to come on-site. Return to office attempts were used to bring isolated workers closers to their peers.
It was always employees who resisted it the most. Most wanted to stay in their lane and limit their social circles to a few coworkers they liked.
> It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments
I can't actually tell what you're talking about or what you want to be illegal.
In recent years the biggest complaint online is that companies have been forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated. If companies were conspiring to isolate coworkers from each other as much as possible, return to office is the last thing you would expect to see.
Companies cultures ( both espoused and actual ) vary a surprising amount. I am saying that having jumped around a bit over the past few decades. Right now for the place I am at, it is mildly crazy ( and annoying to a person that just wants to do focus on their tasks ) how much they are trying to give you the impression that they care. FWIW, as in most places, the actual levels of care vary too.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
> forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated.
They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together
Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.
at the largest platforms they purposely curate communities of workers to get to know each other (this study seems to not include them)
This is because data annotation platforms have very low lock in and workers jump between them opportunistically, so they want to rely on as many (small) network effects as possible
Doing the hard work of mapping out the complex ways workers (labor) and corporate entities (capital) interact across national boundaries should be applauded, especially given the historical context that such relationships are highly exploitative.
I would love to see more examples of systems mapping and systems thinking taught in schools and early career environments. I'm really quite fond of the related [3] Map the System [1] competition. Some excellent examples of systems maps at [2].
In my bubble in undergrad, "policy case competitions" were all the rage. You're given a broad topic (often a wicked problem of some kind such as Housing Inaffordability or Climate Change, or something related to the sponsors field of interest), told to write a policy briefing note with no real constraints (money, resources, time) with recommendations to tackle the problem, and then evaluated by expert judges (typically think tankers, professors, senior government executives) who in a very well-meaning way, oftentimes have nothing significant to add or critique (because again, no constraints and they're nice because it's a learning environment), so they end up saying something along the lines of "have you looked at [vaguely related government program, non-profit initiative, etc.]? They used similar wording to your presentation."
I made the case to a competition organizer that we really ought to do away with this format and switch to something more grounded in systems mapping, because I don't really feel it's reasonable to ask undergrads to propose a policy that will somehow solve a wicked problem, or even a subdomain of one, in one fell swoop. I also don't think the format really encourages much original thinking. Most of the recommendations end up being paraphrases of existing proposed solutions, with little opportunity to meaningfully interrogate why those solutions might or might not work in the first place.
Systems mapping, or using a systems thinking lens, doesn't require you to propose a clear or obvious solution to something, but it does give people a chance to systematically examine problems through their own lenses. Having a student map out how they see the world, what they understand to be the root causes of a given problem, and how different actors and incentives interact could actually change some of our minds on how pervasive these problems are, where the feedback loops exist, and where changes might be most impactful. I think there's considerably more value in asking students to develop an interesting understanding of a problem that expands the domain of understanding than in asking them to come up with a superficially convincing solution to it.
[3]: I'm aware that Ma constructed a literal map of entity relationships and did analysis based off of that, but it's still systems mapping informed by systems thinking, and an excellent example of that.
surprised that this map does not include the largest 3-5 platforms
Most data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
is that true? from looking at the map it seems there are workers and customers in europe, but usually these are separate? most europe workers working for US based entities, and most customers buying from different US entities
The second time I read the output I pay for, some of the words are modified to say the opposite. Is there a map of the hidden global labor powering that?
I think if a certain HN crowd doesn’t like the phrasing of “AI colonialism,” just substitute in “capitalism” and maybe it’ll sit better with your personal opinion (for better or worse).
Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that. This isn't in the same universe as being forced to work to death in a sugarcane field or a gold mine.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
> Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
But it was also stated that their labor is extracted, which sounds like slavery, and that they are exploited, which sounds like fraud, and that they take some psychic damage, which sounds like a JRPG. Those would all be bad things.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of the literal ownership of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
The point at hand is concerning the use of the word "colonialism" in reference to issues of this nature, not providing you with a reference sheet for your convenience. There are plenty of books and articles available to satisfy your desire for citations[0], though honestly I think any degree of awareness around historic patterns of the interactions between (primarily) Western Europe (and the US) and the Global South would suggest that such assertions are at the very least plausibly credible.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
I’m not saying I disagree with the wording of the article. I’m saying that if one does disagree, then framing it in a context that makes more sense to your personal set of morals basically fixes the semantics and you can move on with actually discussing the article’s points.
Everybody who works for money is exploited. Not if theyre exploited, but how much.
And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.
Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?
Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
I'm not being exploited any more than I'm exploiting my employer, that's a toxic way to look at voluntary interactions of people doing their best to escape suffering and death.
It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage. That's not a moral statement about your particular employer, that's just a rational actor model of economics. In turn it's in your interest to expand least labor for the greatest pay. The asymmetry is your employer is an institution that can put incalculable resources into imposing its utility on you, from union busting and productivity spyware to lobbying national policy and conspiring to tilt the labor market... An employer can go months without significant fractions of employees, they can hire an entire hidden backup department in case of a strike, but you'll probably quickly starve without ongoing employment.
And it is in my interest to charge my employer as much as they will pay for my work, regardless of whether or not I would have done it for less. In many cases, I would have, but I still negotiated for more.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and the political economy of the world. If you have ideas about how we can build a better system, I genuinely wish you luck.
I think the fact we take the temperature of the market and label it as a "strong" or "weak labor force" is a counterfactual to the idea there's equivalent exploitation.
It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.
Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?
One can agree to the findings in Das Kapital, and also not agree to the claims of the Communist Manifesto.
And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"
Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.
>Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
China starved tens of millions of people for two decades, it was only after they started opening up the economy in the 70s and allowed people to own farms/shops that living standards started increasing.
Chinese peasants been starving for 1000s of years, it took Chinese communist speedrunning development at the expense of human lives a few decades to end that cycle. Same with Russian serfs. There's a reason PRC lifespan and industrialization was significantly higher than developing peers by the 70s, well before market reforms, fail fast, break eggs make omelette etc etc.
And just how many deaths do capitalists and capitalist policies inflict? We never see *those* numbers.
This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.
But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.
And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.
We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.
Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.
There's a certain elitist mindset that thinks all real value is in hard labour like farming, construction and white collar work is shown to be fake and exploitative.
> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that content
This kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. It's seen as uniquely cruel because it corrupts intangible things like identity and humanity, not knees and joints. We get physically laborious jobs... They're grueling but we understand the inputs, outputs and the toll.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
someone has to do it but it's not a decent job. Content tagging and content moderation are basically the "ditch digging" of the white collar world and often comes with significant toll on those exposed to such content continuously.
It doesn’t have to be black and white though. Consider the alternative where in addition to the $2/hr pay, the people are provided with support and training to also help reduce the adverse effects of sitting in front of such content. Wouldn’t that or other ways to mitigate the effects be better?
I am not saying it isn’t done today. Just that we should consider that as an option when coming from either side of this debate.
Isn't it kind of patriarchal to say that people in the third world shouldn't do jobs that they choose to do, because people in the first world think it's too exploitative? Give them tools that let them connect to other workers and organize, sure, but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
I don't see how your reply connects with what the parent said. But to your point, I don't think anyone in this conversation specifically claimed anything about workers of the third world needing to be prevented from taking these jobs, but rather how they're universally harmful to the human mind.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
Not really - studies have linked these jobs to severe phycological distress. They aren't "good jobs" in the sense that "software developer" is a good job. They're actively harmful to the person's mental well-being.
>but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.
People in white shirts can't sit in air-conditioned rooms and program computers if other people aren't out there growing and harvesting and shipping food.
I think you need to pause and consider how significant the mind is in the body. I've lived in my car before and I will take that over consistent psychological distress of something like that. I don't think that's universal but I really think viewing awful images and text all the time would fuck me up.
I cringe with AI "colonialism".
The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.
Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)
Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.
Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
A primary way academia sells "impact" of research is through moral outrage. Since academic impact, ought in most cases, be relatively fringe and internal to academic priorities -- the demand from society/government to contrive some means to assess its value has lead to an explosion of "morality washing" connecting some topic of investigation to some assumed moral value society is supposed to have.
Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.
That is colonialism. It's not AI colonialism, but it's a generic rich people colonialism that AI, and other industries, are taking advantage of, that causes such a wage disparity to exist in the first place.
market-washed colonialism
> People don't even know about their fellow co-workers.
This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.
It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
This is interesting to me because my experience with larger companies has been the opposite: The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments. Remote workers were pressured to come on-site. Return to office attempts were used to bring isolated workers closers to their peers.
It was always employees who resisted it the most. Most wanted to stay in their lane and limit their social circles to a few coworkers they liked.
> It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments
I can't actually tell what you're talking about or what you want to be illegal.
In recent years the biggest complaint online is that companies have been forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated. If companies were conspiring to isolate coworkers from each other as much as possible, return to office is the last thing you would expect to see.
Companies cultures ( both espoused and actual ) vary a surprising amount. I am saying that having jumped around a bit over the past few decades. Right now for the place I am at, it is mildly crazy ( and annoying to a person that just wants to do focus on their tasks ) how much they are trying to give you the impression that they care. FWIW, as in most places, the actual levels of care vary too.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
> forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated.
They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together
Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.
at the largest platforms they purposely curate communities of workers to get to know each other (this study seems to not include them)
This is because data annotation platforms have very low lock in and workers jump between them opportunistically, so they want to rely on as many (small) network effects as possible
So lets do away with remote work again. Force people to come back to office
Seems like businesses should be embracing remote work instead of hybrid or full time return-to-office.
As the author suspects: "That makes unionizing or anything like that just kind of impossible. "
It's preemptive union busting.
Union nutting if you may
Doing the hard work of mapping out the complex ways workers (labor) and corporate entities (capital) interact across national boundaries should be applauded, especially given the historical context that such relationships are highly exploitative.
https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
Is the title meant to be a pun?
I had to read that title several times until I saw the URL.
Is that what we are doing now? Just calling them "Brown students"??
Traffic control and bot detection...: Browser not supported. Thanks again Cloudflare!
I would love to see more examples of systems mapping and systems thinking taught in schools and early career environments. I'm really quite fond of the related [3] Map the System [1] competition. Some excellent examples of systems maps at [2].
In my bubble in undergrad, "policy case competitions" were all the rage. You're given a broad topic (often a wicked problem of some kind such as Housing Inaffordability or Climate Change, or something related to the sponsors field of interest), told to write a policy briefing note with no real constraints (money, resources, time) with recommendations to tackle the problem, and then evaluated by expert judges (typically think tankers, professors, senior government executives) who in a very well-meaning way, oftentimes have nothing significant to add or critique (because again, no constraints and they're nice because it's a learning environment), so they end up saying something along the lines of "have you looked at [vaguely related government program, non-profit initiative, etc.]? They used similar wording to your presentation."
I made the case to a competition organizer that we really ought to do away with this format and switch to something more grounded in systems mapping, because I don't really feel it's reasonable to ask undergrads to propose a policy that will somehow solve a wicked problem, or even a subdomain of one, in one fell swoop. I also don't think the format really encourages much original thinking. Most of the recommendations end up being paraphrases of existing proposed solutions, with little opportunity to meaningfully interrogate why those solutions might or might not work in the first place.
Systems mapping, or using a systems thinking lens, doesn't require you to propose a clear or obvious solution to something, but it does give people a chance to systematically examine problems through their own lenses. Having a student map out how they see the world, what they understand to be the root causes of a given problem, and how different actors and incentives interact could actually change some of our minds on how pervasive these problems are, where the feedback loops exist, and where changes might be most impactful. I think there's considerably more value in asking students to develop an interesting understanding of a problem that expands the domain of understanding than in asking them to come up with a superficially convincing solution to it.
[1]: https://www.skollcentre.org/map-system
[2]: https://www.mapthesystem.ca/2026
[3]: I'm aware that Ma constructed a literal map of entity relationships and did analysis based off of that, but it's still systems mapping informed by systems thinking, and an excellent example of that.
surprised that this map does not include the largest 3-5 platforms
Most data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
It's interesting that in Europe the customer and the labor appear to be relatively colocated. Any theories as to why?
is that true? from looking at the map it seems there are workers and customers in europe, but usually these are separate? most europe workers working for US based entities, and most customers buying from different US entities
What do you say to... This is the "modern mechanical turk?"
The second time I read the output I pay for, some of the words are modified to say the opposite. Is there a map of the hidden global labor powering that?
You're telling me they're recruiting these workers just by offering them attractive wages?!?! Disgusting.
I think if a certain HN crowd doesn’t like the phrasing of “AI colonialism,” just substitute in “capitalism” and maybe it’ll sit better with your personal opinion (for better or worse).
Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that. This isn't in the same universe as being forced to work to death in a sugarcane field or a gold mine.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
> Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
But it was also stated that their labor is extracted, which sounds like slavery, and that they are exploited, which sounds like fraud, and that they take some psychic damage, which sounds like a JRPG. Those would all be bad things.
Hm, some notes:
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of the literal ownership of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
Indeed, those things were stated, but they would seem to be assertions and interpretations rather than anything established by the work at hand.
The point at hand is concerning the use of the word "colonialism" in reference to issues of this nature, not providing you with a reference sheet for your convenience. There are plenty of books and articles available to satisfy your desire for citations[0], though honestly I think any degree of awareness around historic patterns of the interactions between (primarily) Western Europe (and the US) and the Global South would suggest that such assertions are at the very least plausibly credible.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
It's so interesting that the underlying mechanisms never really change, just the trimmings and how they're dressed up.
One thing never changes: class warfare :o
It's hardly just a "certain HN crowd" idea. This is genuinely one of those technologies that might bring about the return of colonialism and empires. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/empires-artificial-inte...
I’m not saying I disagree with the wording of the article. I’m saying that if one does disagree, then framing it in a context that makes more sense to your personal set of morals basically fixes the semantics and you can move on with actually discussing the article’s points.
The fact basically this entire comment section has been downvoted says so much about HN
This shouldn't surprise anyone as soon as they remember the purpose of the parent site.
HN is full of people seeing exploitation and deciding that trying to stop it is not as fun as trying to become the exploiter.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
Yet somehow the countries with far fewer exploiters (billionaires) like those in Europe pay their workers so much less.
Everybody who works for money is exploited. Not if theyre exploited, but how much.
And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.
Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?
Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
I'm not being exploited any more than I'm exploiting my employer, that's a toxic way to look at voluntary interactions of people doing their best to escape suffering and death.
It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage. That's not a moral statement about your particular employer, that's just a rational actor model of economics. In turn it's in your interest to expand least labor for the greatest pay. The asymmetry is your employer is an institution that can put incalculable resources into imposing its utility on you, from union busting and productivity spyware to lobbying national policy and conspiring to tilt the labor market... An employer can go months without significant fractions of employees, they can hire an entire hidden backup department in case of a strike, but you'll probably quickly starve without ongoing employment.
And it is in my interest to charge my employer as much as they will pay for my work, regardless of whether or not I would have done it for less. In many cases, I would have, but I still negotiated for more.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and the political economy of the world. If you have ideas about how we can build a better system, I genuinely wish you luck.
One side is trying to escape suffering and death, the other is trying to create profit from their work.
"Voluntary" is not a word I would use to describe any agreement where one side is choosing between the deal and physical danger or potential death.
I think the fact we take the temperature of the market and label it as a "strong" or "weak labor force" is a counterfactual to the idea there's equivalent exploitation.
It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.
Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?
There are post Soviet countries that still haven't returned to their 1991 GDP.
[delayed]
One can agree to the findings in Das Kapital, and also not agree to the claims of the Communist Manifesto.
And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"
Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.
>Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
China starved tens of millions of people for two decades, it was only after they started opening up the economy in the 70s and allowed people to own farms/shops that living standards started increasing.
Chinese peasants been starving for 1000s of years, it took Chinese communist speedrunning development at the expense of human lives a few decades to end that cycle. Same with Russian serfs. There's a reason PRC lifespan and industrialization was significantly higher than developing peers by the 70s, well before market reforms, fail fast, break eggs make omelette etc etc.
And just how many deaths do capitalists and capitalist policies inflict? We never see *those* numbers.
This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.
But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.
And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.
We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.
Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.
There's a certain elitist mindset that thinks all real value is in hard labour like farming, construction and white collar work is shown to be fake and exploitative.
> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that content
This kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. It's seen as uniquely cruel because it corrupts intangible things like identity and humanity, not knees and joints. We get physically laborious jobs... They're grueling but we understand the inputs, outputs and the toll.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
I’ve always wondered if if fate better than most, mentally, at that job - but for $2/hr I’m hardly willing to find out.
> Its a decent job and some one has to do it
someone has to do it but it's not a decent job. Content tagging and content moderation are basically the "ditch digging" of the white collar world and often comes with significant toll on those exposed to such content continuously.
It doesn’t have to be black and white though. Consider the alternative where in addition to the $2/hr pay, the people are provided with support and training to also help reduce the adverse effects of sitting in front of such content. Wouldn’t that or other ways to mitigate the effects be better?
I am not saying it isn’t done today. Just that we should consider that as an option when coming from either side of this debate.
The irony of saying this while denigrating farm work, the oldest human profession, is mind boggling.
Old = good now? I don’t think it’s fruitful to romanticize farming. That’s the same problem with marxists with hammer and sickle
Spoken like someone who's never had to do it.
Isn't it kind of patriarchal to say that people in the third world shouldn't do jobs that they choose to do, because people in the first world think it's too exploitative? Give them tools that let them connect to other workers and organize, sure, but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
I don't see how your reply connects with what the parent said. But to your point, I don't think anyone in this conversation specifically claimed anything about workers of the third world needing to be prevented from taking these jobs, but rather how they're universally harmful to the human mind.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
The Disturbing Bias In The Rest Is Politics - Barrys Economics[0]
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0o4RhOtjQ
Autonomy is a funny word to use, considering many of these places aren't democracies.
Not really - studies have linked these jobs to severe phycological distress. They aren't "good jobs" in the sense that "software developer" is a good job. They're actively harmful to the person's mental well-being.
>but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.
You mean patronizing? In that case yes it is patronizing
Is it patronizing if that’s all the geopolitical forces have left the workers as a choice?
People in white shirts can't sit in air-conditioned rooms and program computers if other people aren't out there growing and harvesting and shipping food.
What are you refuting by saying this? They didn't discount the importance of agriculture.
I think you need to pause and consider how significant the mind is in the body. I've lived in my car before and I will take that over consistent psychological distress of something like that. I don't think that's universal but I really think viewing awful images and text all the time would fuck me up.