I wonder if executives of companies using mturk-like humans to moderate/classify vile content should be compelled to do the same moderation/classification work themselves for an hour a month. Of course it’s highly unlikely to actually compel them to do this through legislation, but it’s an interesting thought.
Real imagery is one thing but it's hard for me to imagine being traumatized by classifying fictional content, especially text. Getting paid only a few dollars an hour might be painful, though.
Who knows what kind of texts people share though. Granted, you should not be a content moderator if you don't hold the same view as you expressed above, but I have a feeling a lot of these people weren't prepared at all for what people shared with OpenAI, and just got the job for the (relatively) high pay.
But humans can be fucking terrible beings. I could imagine they shared all types of content they had no idea would be read by another human, like confessions of past events and such.
You need people to evaluate the answers to improve the output and adjust the weights, there is a lot of manual labor involved at training every single one of these models, it’s not just magic.
There doesn't have to be manual labor. Anthropic (the Claude Models) use reinforcement learning from AI feedback (dubbed Constitutional AI) and it works great too.
I don't know the scope of OpenAIs data cleaning or RLHF efforts. But I'd guess this is a big part of what's made them the leader. It's one thing to train an LLM on a big text corpus, as researchers do. It's another to actually wade into it and do the curation to turn it into a real product. I know there are public instruction datasets out there, but my guess is OpenAI has put a lot of money into getting cleaner data and more supervised / feedback data. Doing that extra work is the kind if thing that wins when building a product.
It's part of it but it's not necessary to get humans to do it. If you're aware of the Claude Models, they use reinforcement learning from AI feedback and they're great. The best Claude model is only behind GPT-4
After a large model is pretrained on a large corpus, it's not by default an instruction follower. You need an additional fine-tuning process to get it to follow instructions.
There are a number of ways to do that.
1. Supervised Fine-tuning. That is Fine-tuning on a corpus of instructions and responses
2. Reinforcement learning from Human feedback where the model trains to adjusts its responses based on feedback from humans
3. Reinforcement learning from AI feedback. Like above but with another LLM doing the rating/classifying.
Based on the information in the article these complaints were raised after the contract was ended. Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time? The article also mentions the work was worse than they thought, but indicates they were told what the work entailed before starting it. Also the primary person being quoted lost his wife and family, and blames this work on why he lost his wife. Anyone who has been in a relationship knows singular reasons are an oversimplification of a complicated relationship.
It's pretty obviously an unpleasant job, but it does seem like they cherry picked a disgruntled former employee for the story. The jobs pay above average wages, it would be interesting to know the overall sentiment of the people that work there as opposed to just seeing anecdotes designed to provoke outrage.
Would people rather that money just didnt go into the Kenyan economy?
Have you not ever had a shitty job that you could not afford to quit because there was no other work at comparable salary available to you? They talk about how they specifically targeted new graduates. The economy in Kenya is not exactly Silicon Valley.
Hindsight is a great thing; I would assume that psychological damage accumulates. The question you are asking the man who lost his wife was: “Didn’t you know that constantly reading horrific texts, and looking at horrific images would wreck your mind. You should have known before you started?!”
This is just a petition for the Kenyan government to investigate. Kenyan government may need to apply some age restriction, and require that staff be filtered by stability before the start reviewing horrible materials”
"texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest"
> Anyone who has been in a relationship knows singular reasons are an oversimplification of a complicated relationship.
Oh come on:
> The 27-year-old said he would would view up to 700 text passages a day, many depicting graphic sexual violence. He recalls he started avoiding people after having read texts about rapists and found himself projecting paranoid narratives on to people around him. Then last year, his wife told him he was a changed man, and left. She was pregnant at the time. “I lost my family,” he said.
I deal with forensics and have incidental contact with similar; it rubs off on you. Even my own post history reflects a similar personality change over time; I've been accused of being an unmedicated schizophrenic (by someone committing disability fraud of all things). You stop sleeping, knowing what other people are capable of doing, concealing, and actively thinking about (especially when it's people you otherwise think you "know"). You come home progressively-broken from the shit you witness. Add to that a pregnant wife (the pinnacle of logic, reason and stability) and divorce is inevitable. It doesn't need a "complicated" relationship; when you look online, therapists will try to skim whatever they can off of you on the way out but /r/divorce is touted as the only solution to all marital problems-- especially "depressed spouse."
The man's job compelled him to read the equivalent of "The 120 Days of Sodom" every day. I couldn't even stomach it a single time as an edgelord teenager.
> Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time?
Where's your empathy? The company set up shop in Africa for the purpose of exploiting everybody willing to walk through its doors. They don't need to put up with revolutionaries; they'll throw your ass out onto the street because there's a line of people who'll take your spot without complaint. Not an ideal situation to be in when you have a child on the way.
> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher.
For job that while psychologically scarring for some, does not require any education aside from being able to read, that really doesn't seem that bad.
I don't think anyone would dispute that these are not decent wages in Kenya.
What is embarrassing is that the corporation seeks places where wages (relative to western wages) are this low (for what also amounts to the bullshit work).
I think there's times where this makes sense and times where it doesn't. Your local economy is probably better served by being paid to do something else. They probably have a comparative advantage at doing another activity. You'd be better off paying into your local economy where it makes strategic sense.
We're not talking about exporting critical manufacturing skills here. We're talking about doing a crappy job that's only worth doing and paying for if it's dirt cheap.
If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.
in general, there's an economic argument to be made that if you pay disproportionate wages for unskilled labor then there will likely be less skilled labor (doctors, engineers, etc.) in the market which can cripple the ability of the area to grow past unskilled work
If a worker effectively performs the required tasks for $1.46/hr, this demonstrates the work's intrinsic value quite explicitly. The onus to make a higher wage to improve their lifestyle is on the individual, given the freedom they have to allocate their time as they see fit. It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.
> It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.
in the US, we've collectively decided (through elections) that there should be a minimum wage, from which it follows that we've also decided that the "wages have no bottom" argument, i.e. they should be able to go as low as possible without limit, is unethical and detrimental to society.
Yes that’s true. I’m not making the argument that “wages have no bottom”. As another poster has noted, the wage paid in this case is above the local minimum. But as the US participates in global trade, solutions that are extremely uncompetitive like those that rely on relatively higher costs of US unskilled labor, are bound to not be chosen. Forcing the decision makers to use sub-optimal higher cost solutions ultimately makes them uncompetitive and increases the risk of failure. I haven’t seen any logic to justify that.
The minimum wage is zero. 'Minimum wage' laws don't have anything to do with the actual minimum wage. They forbid employment at wages within a range between the minimum wage and a certain so-called 'minimum wage'. People that would otherwise be paid within that range instead get paid the actual minimum wage: nothing.
There is no "what they are worth". There's competition for employees and what they can accept. The same force drives you being paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's not an abstract "what you're worth". They aren't being kind to you. They're just paying what you'll accept, exactly as they are paying those people what they would accept.
Not to say companies couldn't be a little kinder to some people, particularly when it would cost them so very little. I just think phrases like "what you're worth" only obscures what's actually happening, and makes it harder to understand it.
This is simplistic thinking. There is a reason there are minimum wage laws. While those rates are usually woefully low, there was a reason for them to be enacted.
Certainly we can agree that a person’s “worth” from a full-time job be able to live in an inexpensive 1 br apartment, pay utilities, afford medical care, eat healthy food and purchase basic hygienic items, transportation to work, maybe 1-2 weeks of vacation every year?
You would not take this option because you prefer living in the U.S. (or wherever) and being employed there, but that's not the relevant counterfactual for the people doing this work, and it seems like it's preferable to other options they actually have, else it would hardly attract workers.
Don't get me wrong, companies have an obligation to guarantee some level of workplace safety and healthy conditions etc.! But arguing that it's exploitation to buy labour where it is more affordable is plain silly.
That Kenyan workers don't have more favorable counterfactuals for employment doesn't place companies' behavior beyond critique, because the (collective) behavior of companies that employ workers in Kenya is partially determinative of what the counterfactuals themselves are.
If you fall off a bridge into a river and are drowning, and I'm the only person around, it's still exploitation if I try to make you promise to pay me $10k before I'll throw you the life buoy. It doesn't matter that, counterfactually, the alternative is death. It doesn't matter that you'd be far worse off if I wasn't around to offer you my help (at the maximum price I can extract).
Likewise, the fact that many Kenyans have no strong employment prospects doesn't mean that companies moving their labor to Kenya aren't wrongfully exploiting the situation. And that's leaving aside the fact that centuries of exploitation have created the economic conditions in Kenya. Benefiting from that is something akin to making money off the guy in the river, and it turns out your dad is the one who pushed him in to begin with.
My perspective on this is more like "the locals will work x amount of time to get by either way, and you are offering them to work x amount of time and get a better living, or maintain their standard of living at lower x." (replace "time" with "time x enjoyment lost from missed leisure time", i.e. opportunity cost of time, if you will). You win because you get the work done cheaper or get to get more work done than you would "back home", the worker wins because they have a better alternative they didn't have before.
This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever.
It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true.
As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.
This is incoherent. If Kenyans don't have strong employment prospects then offering them jobs isn't "wrongfully exploiting the situation". It's the exact opposite: it is providing them employment prospects they'd otherwise lack.
The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.
Emergency responders have to deal with what I'd imagine the typical person would consider traumatic but we've agreed that their jobs are necessary in order for society to be efficacious. Not everyone has the same physiological response to disturbing content and it would appear people that take up these distressful emergency jobs are less likely to ever even have any traumatic stress responses in some studies IIRC.
Maybe up to 33% of the world's population would find reading text triggers traumatic stress responses if I had to make an educated guess - not to diminish their experiences. But I'd imagine most people would just find the job boring or somewhat nauseating.
Should be trivial to significantly reduce human cost without completely removing their jobs anyway.
The potential harms of reviewing fucked up material even fictional are well attested. It's factored into law enforcement & child porn investigations and has been for years.
I am assuming you knew that though, and just enjoyed this little moment of belittling someone for their suffering. Hope it was nice. Hope you're having the day you wanted to have.
I really don't know it, because I truly cannot imagine how text could cause trauma to a normal person in the position of a third-party. And I'm assuming normal here, because they decided to do it as a job.
The moderators say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support.
As noted above and below, it wasn't just text:
The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest, the petitioners say.
> because I truly cannot imagine
You're not alone, there's likely a higher than normal percentage of HN'rs that have difficulty imagining how other people react and feel.
To all the pissy commentators on here - Average Monthly HOUSEHOLD Income in Kenya is around $145/month [0]
The fact that Sama's STARTING SALARY is almost $300/month is staggering.
That's the equivalent of being a SWE in the US (around $140k median salary) when the median salary in this country is around $65-70k/yr.
Also, at $300/month I could hire plenty of English speaking moderators and labelers in Central/Southern Phillipines or Madhya Pradesh/Bihar and not have to deal with level of instability Kenya has. They're honestly lucky Sama even chose Kenya as a base to operate instead of going with Infosys or the Pinoy equivalent (if anyone has experience with the PH BPO industry, I'd love to learn more)
Median is an average, just like the mode, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, etc., are, even though most of the time when “average” is used without specifying which one, its actually the arithmetic mean.
And given that Kenya's Gini coefficient is 51.3, that means the median Kenyan household is earning less than $145/month, which only shows that Sama is paying competitively at the national level.
It doesn't look like he couldn't have left the job he found unsuitable. Especially in Kenya, where the rule of law and contract enforcement are not that stringent...
If I don't like blood, I better not work at a hospital or a butcher shop. Content moderation is hard and it's not for everyone.
What instability does Kenya have? There are sporadic minimal localized protests about the cost of living that happen now and then, but nothing on the scale of the animosity that exists between different religious groups in India (that flares up now and then, according to what I see in the news, which I recognize could be leading to me doing what I'm accusing you of). And $300 per month is too low, even in Kenya. That's what I earned in my first underpaid practically-an-unpaid-internship straight-out-of-university job 15 years ago.
I do agree, there is significant unemployment, and it's possible that outside Nairobi, without rent and growing some food for yourself, $300 could go a long way.
I was speaking more in terms of "should", not "is". I think most semi-skilled jobs are probably paid around that, but it honestly doesn't compute to my privileged self how someone could live on that, with the rampant inflation.
And yea, inflation seems to be hellish outside the US+Canada.
Companies like SamaSource or Infosys can take advantage of that arbitrage by paying below a living wage because there are enough "desperate" or un/underemployed people who have higher education but aren't getting jobs that are paying a realistic/living wage.
I've seen this issue play out all over the developing world (India, Philippines, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Brazil, etc).
Millions of people in those countries are now living lives their grandparents could only dream of, education is much more democratized, and economies at a macro level are better than they were a generation ago - yet white collar/college educated salaries are still stuck at the 2000s or 2010s level because income rate conversions dropped or commodities have inflated. People are earning the same amount of money in Rupees, Yuan, Reales, Dong, etc as they would have 10-15 years ago for the same white collar job, but all of society has become much more expensive.
(I have edited to flesh these out a bit more, but have stopped since there is a reply)
I've kinda waffled in my opinion of outsourcing through the years, but one issue I keep coming back to is that you can trivially view it as massive, intentional wage suppression.
"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be. The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.
"No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education or provide alternatives that could let them fight back on this exploitation.
And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.
---
And, yes, it also brings a lot of outside wealth into those areas. At high human cost, but still.
idk. I do find myself leaning more and more towards it being almost universally a bad thing though. Particularly when they keep saying it's a highly exploitative thing, when they manage to bust through to international news.
>"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be.
It's incoherent reply - if a job does not require high qualifications, besides language knowledge, going for cheapest place is the obvious thing.
>The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.
They are all paying more than local alternatives, thereby increasing local wages.
> "No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education
3 dollars per hour is more than Polish minimum wage 10 years ago, and we funded education with much, much less. But I guess no foreign company should invest here? It would leave us in a way better place for sure.
>And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.
Pretty much all this summarizes as "yes, it's valuable work to the individual".
Broadly I agree - a lot of it is clearly a pretty big positive.
But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Not all of them! There are clear benefits to colocating labor (manufacturing in particular) and some legitimately seem to be spending the money and effort to make sure it's being done ethically. A strong majority very clearly does not though, and outsourced moderation seems to consistently fall into the uncaring category.
> Pretty much all this summarizes as "yes, it's valuable work to the individual".
Individuals are making up the societies. Few dozen of people working relatively high income, are lifting whole countries up - that's how globalization have worked.
>But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Now you're not actually accusing them of anything, but _comparing_ to other potential bad things.
Those jobs aren't pleasant - as is working 12 hour shift in an ironworks - but they are damn better than subsistence farming and dying when there's draught one year.
And after those bad jobs, come progressively better ones.
>most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Much of this would not be possible on a fair playing field. It happens because the companies outsourcing wield immensely disproportionate power, so they can get away with it. If "maybe we shouldn't let them kill people and dump the trash in their water supply" means slowing things down, I suspect it would be a net benefit, even after losing most of the positives it brings in.
I recognize it's complex and opinions differ, of course. Not claiming I alone am right or that my opinion won't change.
> The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.
That’s the point of capitalism—-it works if you have only your own interests at heart. Wealthy Global Company A enters a market and makes huge profits. Wealth Global Company B (and maybe C, D, E, F, etc) sees they’re making those profits, and enters that market too. Workers then have choices of where they can work and can demand higher wages and better conditions.
> it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere
Country A has average wages of $40/hr, and Country B has average wages of $0.40/hr. If companies in Country A move some jobs to Country B and wages in Country A fall to $39/hr and wages in Country B rise to $1.40/hr, but prices also fall in Country A to make up for the fall in lost wages, is the world really worse off?
> At high human cost
What’s the human cost of not having available jobs? It means children don’t get schooling or vaccines. No access to social mobility. If you get sick from easily curable diseases, you’ll likely just die. No chance of retirement—you just work in the fields until you die.
If you want to see the benefits of “outsourcing” these types of low skill jobs, look at Bangladesh. The country has gone from one of the poorest places on Earth, to closing in on middle income status in about two decades.
> If companies in Country A move some jobs to Country B [...] is the world really worse off?
If the only change is salaries then no. My only objection to offshoring is when the conditions the workers are expected to endure are clearly far below what we'd consider minimally reasonable in developed countries - my basic rule is that "would people still hypothetically buy your product if they had walk through your factory first and observe those conditions first hand?".
And no I don't think it's really enough to say "well at least it's better than subsistence farming" - in that case the conditions aren't (by and large) being imposed on them by others. It's a good thing corporations from developed economies are able to offer new employment opportunities in poorer countries, but for the sake of our own humanity, we still need to treat employees with the same basic decency as we would if they were in our own country.
This was not a thing before Western media tried to create a narrative. After that Kenyans saw the opportunity and started feeding it. I don't blame them.
Any form of repeated exposure to content or propaganda is bound to have a lasting impact on both our cognition as well as memory. This is how we are wired. The key is to ensure we are able to draw boundaries - a key reason why we are all talk about social feed / content moderation.
The challenge is when you can afford to pay and get someone else to do it - is it your problem and do you care if it affects someone else.
Do corporations bear responsibility for affecting people who they employ and put into severe conditions which they are aware have long lasting impact?
What is stopping us from creating a "supervisory AI" that understands the difference between good content and bad content and having it perform the role of these humans? More broadly speaking training and overseeing a sufficiently advanced AI seems like it could only be done effectively by another AI. The human oversight could be temporarily redirected to validating the supervisory AI.
Somebody once told me "yeah, without some slavery, THAT also wouldn't work", and I see it so often in products and concepts around us day by day. This isn't about the income gap. It's extracting work from a certain class for pennies, and create immense wealth from it on the other side of the globe without those people even knowing what it is about, let alone take part or benefit from it long term.
After centuries what we achieved is more sustainable, scaleable slavery.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadBut humans can be fucking terrible beings. I could imagine they shared all types of content they had no idea would be read by another human, like confessions of past events and such.
I thought the approach was to let the neural network predict the next word in a large corpus of text?
There are a number of ways to do that.
1. Supervised Fine-tuning. That is Fine-tuning on a corpus of instructions and responses
2. Reinforcement learning from Human feedback where the model trains to adjusts its responses based on feedback from humans
3. Reinforcement learning from AI feedback. Like above but with another LLM doing the rating/classifying.
Would people rather that money just didnt go into the Kenyan economy?
Oh come on:
> The 27-year-old said he would would view up to 700 text passages a day, many depicting graphic sexual violence. He recalls he started avoiding people after having read texts about rapists and found himself projecting paranoid narratives on to people around him. Then last year, his wife told him he was a changed man, and left. She was pregnant at the time. “I lost my family,” he said.
I deal with forensics and have incidental contact with similar; it rubs off on you. Even my own post history reflects a similar personality change over time; I've been accused of being an unmedicated schizophrenic (by someone committing disability fraud of all things). You stop sleeping, knowing what other people are capable of doing, concealing, and actively thinking about (especially when it's people you otherwise think you "know"). You come home progressively-broken from the shit you witness. Add to that a pregnant wife (the pinnacle of logic, reason and stability) and divorce is inevitable. It doesn't need a "complicated" relationship; when you look online, therapists will try to skim whatever they can off of you on the way out but /r/divorce is touted as the only solution to all marital problems-- especially "depressed spouse."
The man's job compelled him to read the equivalent of "The 120 Days of Sodom" every day. I couldn't even stomach it a single time as an edgelord teenager.
> Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time?
Where's your empathy? The company set up shop in Africa for the purpose of exploiting everybody willing to walk through its doors. They don't need to put up with revolutionaries; they'll throw your ass out onto the street because there's a line of people who'll take your spot without complaint. Not an ideal situation to be in when you have a child on the way.
I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher.
For job that while psychologically scarring for some, does not require any education aside from being able to read, that really doesn't seem that bad.
What is embarrassing is that the corporation seeks places where wages (relative to western wages) are this low (for what also amounts to the bullshit work).
We're not talking about exporting critical manufacturing skills here. We're talking about doing a crappy job that's only worth doing and paying for if it's dirt cheap.
True. Those critical skills have already been exported from the US.
These people weren't "sent to work in Kenya." They already live in Kenya, and are getting wages that are typical of jobs in Kenya.
in the US, we've collectively decided (through elections) that there should be a minimum wage, from which it follows that we've also decided that the "wages have no bottom" argument, i.e. they should be able to go as low as possible without limit, is unethical and detrimental to society.
There is no "what they are worth". There's competition for employees and what they can accept. The same force drives you being paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's not an abstract "what you're worth". They aren't being kind to you. They're just paying what you'll accept, exactly as they are paying those people what they would accept.
Not to say companies couldn't be a little kinder to some people, particularly when it would cost them so very little. I just think phrases like "what you're worth" only obscures what's actually happening, and makes it harder to understand it.
Certainly we can agree that a person’s “worth” from a full-time job be able to live in an inexpensive 1 br apartment, pay utilities, afford medical care, eat healthy food and purchase basic hygienic items, transportation to work, maybe 1-2 weeks of vacation every year?
Don't get me wrong, companies have an obligation to guarantee some level of workplace safety and healthy conditions etc.! But arguing that it's exploitation to buy labour where it is more affordable is plain silly.
If you fall off a bridge into a river and are drowning, and I'm the only person around, it's still exploitation if I try to make you promise to pay me $10k before I'll throw you the life buoy. It doesn't matter that, counterfactually, the alternative is death. It doesn't matter that you'd be far worse off if I wasn't around to offer you my help (at the maximum price I can extract).
Likewise, the fact that many Kenyans have no strong employment prospects doesn't mean that companies moving their labor to Kenya aren't wrongfully exploiting the situation. And that's leaving aside the fact that centuries of exploitation have created the economic conditions in Kenya. Benefiting from that is something akin to making money off the guy in the river, and it turns out your dad is the one who pushed him in to begin with.
This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever.
It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true.
As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.
The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.
Maybe up to 33% of the world's population would find reading text triggers traumatic stress responses if I had to make an educated guess - not to diminish their experiences. But I'd imagine most people would just find the job boring or somewhat nauseating.
Should be trivial to significantly reduce human cost without completely removing their jobs anyway.
I am assuming you knew that though, and just enjoyed this little moment of belittling someone for their suffering. Hope it was nice. Hope you're having the day you wanted to have.
You're not alone, there's likely a higher than normal percentage of HN'rs that have difficulty imagining how other people react and feel.
The fact that Sama's STARTING SALARY is almost $300/month is staggering.
That's the equivalent of being a SWE in the US (around $140k median salary) when the median salary in this country is around $65-70k/yr.
Also, at $300/month I could hire plenty of English speaking moderators and labelers in Central/Southern Phillipines or Madhya Pradesh/Bihar and not have to deal with level of instability Kenya has. They're honestly lucky Sama even chose Kenya as a base to operate instead of going with Infosys or the Pinoy equivalent (if anyone has experience with the PH BPO industry, I'd love to learn more)
[0] - https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/economy/kenyans-avera...
And given that Kenya's Gini coefficient is 51.3, that means the median Kenyan household is earning less than $145/month, which only shows that Sama is paying competitively at the national level.
Source: I live in Nairobi.
I brainfarted and typed that instead of intertia and can't edit it now that the timer has passed.
Kenya is definetly on a solid path developmentally.
Though I'd be curious if someone who did a BA or BSc in a non-STEM major from a non-target university could get a $300/mon starting salary in Kenya.
Those tend to be the kinds of people who end up working as labelers in PH and IN, and I'd assume it's similar in Kenya.
I was speaking more in terms of "should", not "is". I think most semi-skilled jobs are probably paid around that, but it honestly doesn't compute to my privileged self how someone could live on that, with the rampant inflation.
And yea, inflation seems to be hellish outside the US+Canada.
Companies like SamaSource or Infosys can take advantage of that arbitrage by paying below a living wage because there are enough "desperate" or un/underemployed people who have higher education but aren't getting jobs that are paying a realistic/living wage.
I've seen this issue play out all over the developing world (India, Philippines, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Brazil, etc).
Millions of people in those countries are now living lives their grandparents could only dream of, education is much more democratized, and economies at a macro level are better than they were a generation ago - yet white collar/college educated salaries are still stuck at the 2000s or 2010s level because income rate conversions dropped or commodities have inflated. People are earning the same amount of money in Rupees, Yuan, Reales, Dong, etc as they would have 10-15 years ago for the same white collar job, but all of society has become much more expensive.
I've kinda waffled in my opinion of outsourcing through the years, but one issue I keep coming back to is that you can trivially view it as massive, intentional wage suppression.
"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be. The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.
"No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education or provide alternatives that could let them fight back on this exploitation.
And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.
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And, yes, it also brings a lot of outside wealth into those areas. At high human cost, but still.
idk. I do find myself leaning more and more towards it being almost universally a bad thing though. Particularly when they keep saying it's a highly exploitative thing, when they manage to bust through to international news.
>"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be.
It's incoherent reply - if a job does not require high qualifications, besides language knowledge, going for cheapest place is the obvious thing.
>The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.
They are all paying more than local alternatives, thereby increasing local wages.
> "No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education
3 dollars per hour is more than Polish minimum wage 10 years ago, and we funded education with much, much less. But I guess no foreign company should invest here? It would leave us in a way better place for sure.
>And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.
Once the same propaganda you're spewing was playing for Asia. It turned out globalization really made them comparatively rich. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/...
Now it's time for Africa. The same argument is now even more incoherent - where's the cheaper place?
>And, yes, it also brings a lot of outside wealth into those areas. At high human cost, but still.
At the cost of... work.
Broadly I agree - a lot of it is clearly a pretty big positive.
But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Not all of them! There are clear benefits to colocating labor (manufacturing in particular) and some legitimately seem to be spending the money and effort to make sure it's being done ethically. A strong majority very clearly does not though, and outsourced moderation seems to consistently fall into the uncaring category.
Individuals are making up the societies. Few dozen of people working relatively high income, are lifting whole countries up - that's how globalization have worked.
>But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Now you're not actually accusing them of anything, but _comparing_ to other potential bad things.
Those jobs aren't pleasant - as is working 12 hour shift in an ironworks - but they are damn better than subsistence farming and dying when there's draught one year.
And after those bad jobs, come progressively better ones.
>most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.
Much of this would not be possible on a fair playing field. It happens because the companies outsourcing wield immensely disproportionate power, so they can get away with it. If "maybe we shouldn't let them kill people and dump the trash in their water supply" means slowing things down, I suspect it would be a net benefit, even after losing most of the positives it brings in.
I recognize it's complex and opinions differ, of course. Not claiming I alone am right or that my opinion won't change.
That’s the point of capitalism—-it works if you have only your own interests at heart. Wealthy Global Company A enters a market and makes huge profits. Wealth Global Company B (and maybe C, D, E, F, etc) sees they’re making those profits, and enters that market too. Workers then have choices of where they can work and can demand higher wages and better conditions.
> it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere
Country A has average wages of $40/hr, and Country B has average wages of $0.40/hr. If companies in Country A move some jobs to Country B and wages in Country A fall to $39/hr and wages in Country B rise to $1.40/hr, but prices also fall in Country A to make up for the fall in lost wages, is the world really worse off?
> At high human cost
What’s the human cost of not having available jobs? It means children don’t get schooling or vaccines. No access to social mobility. If you get sick from easily curable diseases, you’ll likely just die. No chance of retirement—you just work in the fields until you die.
If you want to see the benefits of “outsourcing” these types of low skill jobs, look at Bangladesh. The country has gone from one of the poorest places on Earth, to closing in on middle income status in about two decades.
I feel like the problem is that this part is usually skipped over.
If the only change is salaries then no. My only objection to offshoring is when the conditions the workers are expected to endure are clearly far below what we'd consider minimally reasonable in developed countries - my basic rule is that "would people still hypothetically buy your product if they had walk through your factory first and observe those conditions first hand?". And no I don't think it's really enough to say "well at least it's better than subsistence farming" - in that case the conditions aren't (by and large) being imposed on them by others. It's a good thing corporations from developed economies are able to offer new employment opportunities in poorer countries, but for the sake of our own humanity, we still need to treat employees with the same basic decency as we would if they were in our own country.
The challenge is when you can afford to pay and get someone else to do it - is it your problem and do you care if it affects someone else.
Do corporations bear responsibility for affecting people who they employ and put into severe conditions which they are aware have long lasting impact?
After centuries what we achieved is more sustainable, scaleable slavery.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...