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 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.
Those people are only getting good jobs because other people are getting worse jobs. It's like the law of conservation of entropy: the inside of your fridge only gets cold because the back of your fridge gets warmer than the inside gets cold.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. I believe the world sees it as more cruel because it corrupts intangible things like one's 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 cruel 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 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.
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.
Well fortunately you don't get to tell people what they should romanticize. I know it's hard for an upper-middle class white computer programmer to understand, but some people actually prefer farming to sweatshops.
"Someone" == likely a brown person from a different country and certainly not simianwords.
>I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
The real reason you're arguing this is because you want to keep the flow of cheap, exploitative labor going because people who live in first world countries benefit from the downstream impacts.
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?
This is just a blatant ad hominem, and more shows on your character that'd you'd attack a person, rather than the ideas/claims.
Who cares what the person describes themselves as. Do the claims being made validate with evidence, or not enough evidence, or are invalidated BY evidence?
If the claims are valid and provable, who cares about some label-bingo.
"Who cares what the person describes themselves as."
Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.
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.
Yeah this is super out of date. I work on one of these platforms as a developer, and basically none of our work is labelling data or viewing child porn. It's entirely RL Envs, and pay starts at $35 an hour and goes up to $100.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The difference lies in the power dynamic: if you don't like the terms, you can look elsewhere to find a better fit; if the employer doesn't like the terms, you may find yourself out of a job faster than you can replace it. For some people it may not be a big deal, but for many it's a significant factor in how hard they push for what they feel would be fair compensation.
It doesn't really matter if I do, it matters if the economists who study it do. It's not controversial to say that "shock therapy" was a disaster, and that living standards have plummeted since the collapse of communism in many countries.
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.
Serfdom in Russia was abolished half a century before the Soviets. Moreover, the tsar himself was gone by the time the Soviets came along. Their October Revolution overthrew the tsarless regime that had been instituted in the preceding February Revolution.
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"
The alternative to money is that we all farm, hunt or steal food from someone else, and build and maintain our own shelter; the universe owes us nothing. Money is how we trade our time and expertise for someone else’s.
> 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.
> 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.
It’s not about control. It’s silly to suggest that most people are equal or better at coordinating work over periodic zoom calls than by being together in person.
I work fully remote, by necessity. But it’s not better. I’m less in touch with everything going on inside and outside my teams, than I was when I was in-office 9-5.
> 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.
Is that the standard for ‘employee camaraderie’ that you were ever used to during your career? I have only been working in the “white collar” world for about 20 years but in any company big enough that they contract out cleaning, the cleaners are not attending the company parties. And put yourself in their shoes, do you actually want to come to some tech company party after work? I would have as much interest in attending a party full of say, rich Hollywood producers, which is to say zero. (The only reasons to want to attend a party of a higher social class in my opinion is networking or celebrity-spotting and neither seems relevant in the context we’re discussing).
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.
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
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
im not sure what gives you the impression that wrongness (or an accusation thereof) was present here. may i ask why you felt the need to ask? personally i think it's interesting to be aware that many AI-isms originate in human english expression localized to certain regions.
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.
Then that's not colonialism, it's just modern day serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest.
Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like power over smaller and weaker countries, but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left.
But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're serfs of usury by the international banking system, which can be seen as a colonial power in a way, since no modern country can operate without it being part of it whether they want to or not.
"Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain,"
that's definitionally colonilism under imperialism.
"but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left."
not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction. Nations that kick out the foreign influence under libertaory action often are sanctioned or invaded to try and topple them and revert to depedance on western intervention, but, when they succeed, rights and success often are much increased for the people in them, see "Human Rights in the USSR" by albert syzmenski, who uses only western sources for the book to steelman his position.
The western dependence happens through layers of coordinated and planned proxy vasselization. See the books "Unequal exchange" by Arghiri Emmanuel and "superimperilaism" by michael hudson for more details and scientific treatments of the question. "Inventing Reality" by Micheal Parenti might be another good read for you!
"But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it,"
Glad that one of the other sibling comments looked this quote up so I didn't have to. Fully "growing the scope:"
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
"Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest."
This distinction collapses under the scientific understandings of imperialism and colonialism, linked above in more detail.
>not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction.
When and where did that happen? When they were kicked out by force, radical nationalists took power on the basis of "kicking out the oppressors/colonizers" who 100% weren't puppets of the original colonizers, but the contrary.
Case in point North Korea, Cuba and Iran. Those regimes are 100% not US/UK puppets and yet they don't treat their people much nicer than under US/Western rule they revolted from.
USSR soviet Marxist communism was designed as a antithesis to US/western capitalism, and its workers ended up more oppressed than workers in the US, and the USSR was a world power, not a small powerless country like Cuba or Iran that could be bullied by US sanctions into poverty and submission, so its poverty was entirely self inflicted.
For the benefit of others, the correct spelling is: Szymanski.
Thank you for this voluminous comment, I'm reading through this and others that have been downvoted, and just wanted to show my appreciation, it's been insightful and educational. I've made notes of the books mentioned, and will be studying them over time.
Pretty much. Humanity was always in a state of poverty and extreme wealth inequality. The last 80+ years since WW2 were a short exception from that which is why we're slowly reverting back to factory defaults with most of the resources in the hands of a select few.
Can I recommend a work by a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, that was concerned with this exact mechanism and described it in detail?
Let me know if any of this sounds at all relevant to the situation we find ourselves in:
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
Could you rephrase your argument here? I'm having some trouble understanding this sentence fragment.
If you're trying to pull up some old trope about how people are choosing to get shit wages for shit work, then let me remind you that the alternative is starvation . Some fine choice.
> And you confused capitalism with colonialism.
I didn't confuse anything, I linked a famous piece of political theory positing they are interlinked phenomena.
> If you did that on purpose, you brought up whataboutism.
I'm also confused by what you are trying to say here. Who brought up whataboutism? I never spoke of it? Didn't you just bring it up? I'm confused.
> I aint playing your game diverting attention from my comment.
Nobody's diverting. I was directly engaging with it and providing some theory to further understanding and illustrate different perspectives on a term people sometimes get tripped up by.
It is telling you perceive anything but uncritical agreement as diversion. I would encourage you to bring the spirit of curiosity the guidelines call for.
Since there are no colonies involved, a better characterization would be: Free market capitalism under the rules based order established by the US and its allies after the end of World War II. You could, and many have, criticize that system, but it is not colonialism.
How convenient for those who continue to participate in the generational exploitation of labor and funding of terror by foreign capital. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist and sweep it under the rug.
I would say it’s no less convenient for those that tend to overuse the word to label anything as colonialism or terrorism. It absolves them from building any sort of coherent and substantiated argument.
> “extracts low-wage labor from data workers in the Global South”
Jeez. The outrage-bait is dripping off of this sentence. Paying above the prevailing wage in a town for simple computer work, adding money to the local economy = extracting low-wage labor. It’s phrased like it’s sticking a syringe into Bangladesh and stealing their blood.
Foreign companies suddenly increasing local wage levels isn't popular with local governments because it means all the local essential workers, doctors, government employees etc quit their jobs to work for the foreign company.
It the Copenhagen theory of ethics. If an AI company had no operations at all in the global south, no one would blame them for the global south's position. But if they hire anyone there, it doesn't matter if they're objectively improving conditions there, the fact that they've interacted at all means that they're responsible all the bad parts about it.
> How about they just don't treat their workers in the Global South as lesser than ones in rich countries, for starters?
When you say "lesser", isn't this just a question of regional pay disparity? Are you saying companies should be obligated to pay the same compensation in every region? Do you know how badly that would destroy the economies in the Global South?
Low pay is partially a reason why people have off-shored their industries there. If the government is somewhat competent, they can use the increased amount of funds to get more investors, build more infrastructure, attract more people (workers, investors, even tourists) until the nation becomes wealthy enough that it's essentially first world in all but name.
Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
> Low pay is partially a reason why people have off-shored their industries there.
Exactly. That is precisely the financial imperialism I'm criticizing. Instead of gunboats, it is capital that puts the Global South into servitude.
> Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
This is structurally limited to a few places. By the very nature of the system we find ourselves in, you will always need somewhere to exploit, somebody to do the shit work for shit wages.
The pitch you're making is basically "if you're lucky, you can become an exploiter, too!". No. We have to end the exploitation.
> Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
Yes, now that Britain is rich enough, they make poorer people's kids work for them [0] [1]. That's exactly what people mean when they talk of colonialism as a form of capitalism.
I agree with your concerns, but there's not a lot of economical systems that could quickly make poor societies reasonably wealthy in a short, or sustainable period of time.
There exist 2 fairly good types of government-economical ties in this world, and both of which are fleetingly rare, with only one type actually growing consistently.
I would say they are, in no particular order, the "East Asian Values" model as created/noted by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and the Mondragon Corporation by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta.
The "East Asian Values" model is often used for Singaporean or Chinese style state capitalism, but the Japanese and Koreans have also had a similar economies, and Taipei has flirted with some part of it through TSMC (although they don't own the company outright). This model is pretty good for getting a country rich somewhat quickly, but it does implicate a strong central government.
The Mondragon Corp on the other hand, while technically a private sector business, it's a full Co-op owned by the workers themselves and has a lot of relations with the Spanish Government. This arguably is the less "exploitative" type of government-economical system, but it also implicates a semi-homogenous society, at least one high trust enough to reasonably and responsibly manage a co-op, even in the most rural areas of Basque Spain. The only other similar economies, perhaps are the Ayllu system in Peru, tequio in Mexico, or other often informal collectivist (but certainly not communist) systems.
It should be noted however, that although the Basques were extremely poor, Spain was still a European society, and as such, did commit a lot of gunboat economies, most notably the conquest of the Americas.
Wealth creation, by definition, is somewhat exploitative. The good news, is that this type of exploitation therefore, unlike colonialism, actually gives a lot of power to the exploited over time as wealth is created over time.
My (mostly indigenous) grandparents were lucky to have worked in factories in order to escape farm life, but there were multiple close calls. I imagine it's something similar with all Industrializing societies, wherein a nation commits to an almost Faustian bargain of getting wealth at the cost of brutal working hours. But at some point, "Fordist" thinking prevails, where people either through protests, unions, and also to increase overall economic consumption, people get paid more, they start to live more comfortable lives as many begin to focus on skilled labor and intellectual work. It's not a simple overnight process, but wealth creation does imply first-world like living conditions might come fairly soon to a lot of nations, especially those that started in mass production based factories.
It initially got an eye roll our of me, but it looks like the term that's been thrown around increasingly, and not entirely without cause. If the patterns, parallels, and impacts are close enough to make the comparison valid then it might be a more reasonable term than I expected. Colonialism doesn't necessarily require forced intervention or conquest. There are several definitions, but one would be the domination/exploitation of a people to serve a foreign power. By driving down wages, data harvesting through surveillance, and stealing natural resources tech companies are just as capable of exploiting and plundering as governments have been.
Its labor unions/movement that fund tech equity that provides database availability for the data visualization coming out of Brown.
It would make sense being that this is Brown with probably the most socially progressive view in the higher ed space. I didn't realize there was such a drive to tie this all together though.
Same. I wish they would get the perspective of those that are doing this “awful” work. They might be completely happy doing a desk job for a decent local wage. Instead they explain the work as horrible and place pity on those forced to do the job. We don’t have enough perspective to know if those people feel like they’re being taken advantage of.
On a similar note; I worked for a pathologist when I was in college. I saw and handled all types of body parts. I helped in the morgue. When I talked to people about it they felt bad for me. I loved it and made twice as much money as anyone else I knew working in college. It was a great deal. You quickly become desensitized to the parts people think are awful. Most people in healthcare that see crazy stuff can attest to this.
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.
Bro, how is it hidden? I also annotate AI all day because I’m using it and I’m telling it whether it’s right or wrong we all are. That’s basically the future. a human with a bit more context than a machine guiding it. Also, this comment section is hilariously bad as is the articles framing of everything that we don’t like as colonialism.
I appreciate what the project is trying to do, but why go on radical hyperbole such as "That, Ma says, is the essence of AI colonialism — the extraction of difficult, low-paid labor from the Global South for profit in the West."?
Also, do Chinese companies pay a higher rate? I have no idea. But Chinese data annotators also have to work with graphic content, I believe.
The workers are made to read bad things as part of AI training process, but they are adults agreeing to work in those things in exchange of pay, and they can always quit. The "workers" are computer literate English-speaking elites with stable internet connections even in poorer countries.
I have interacted with students from all over the world on different occasions. If I meet a student from India/US/China/Europe in a global research/academic/engineering forum, there is a non-trivial possibility that they are from a middle class or lower background, but when I meet, say, Africans, Bangladeshi people in the same places, they are almost always elites in their respective countries. It's not surprising, tbh.
My point it, when you are working for 4-5 USD per hour from Africa, you can communicate using good English, have a decent computer, have stable internet connection, a college degree, you are doing the AI work by choice.
Being paid by hours even in India is a great privilege where the culture is to make people work 10-12 hours shift for the pay of 8.
They say, "$2", I don't have any direct experience, but I saw ads for $4-$5 per hour, and that is for non-specialist work, and if you get steady work, you are paid more than "engineers" with 4 year degree at the end of the month.
In India, freshers Engineers in consultation shops get ₹30-40k per month, and have to be in office for 8-12 hours per day. Where 4$ per hour pay will get you 4$ * ₹95 * 8 hours per day * 5 days per week * 4 weeks per month = ₹60,800, which is enough for a comfortable middle class life (outside metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.). There is also no money to be paid for rent, commute, etc.
People getting into these positions are getting in by choice, and remaining by choice.
If they wanted to shed light on real woes, they should have focused on the small terms the workers are hired for. And work not being regular, people laid off on short notice, short term contracts, etc.
Seeing salary as well as prices in US dollars eyes is a common folly. This is what I believe is called "geo arb".
OK, so all of the evil capitalist western companies entirely pull out of the global south, taking their evil dehumanising "work" with them. Then what?
Maybe the lucky ones get to work as domestics or laborers in the Middle East? I'm sure that's much better than reading AI slop in your home country with their children living with them and their friends and family nearby.
These kinds of attempts at labelling global labor arbitrage as "colonialism" always seem naive. For thousands of years, capital has always sought the cheapest source of labor. Via offering cheap labor, China went from a poor country to a middle-income to wealthy country in a generation. The international exchange of currency for productivity via mutually beneficial arrangements is the means through which global GDP continues to grow exponentially. Data labelling and such is just the latest incarnation of that.
Now there are many other risks of AI associated with its ability to centralize power, lead to chaotic outcomes, etc, but that is disconnected from this somewhat mundane reality of how capitalism works. It seems like many opponents of AI are focusing on the wrong things, like how data centers apparently used more water than entire cities or turned the water supply brown.
> These kinds of attempts at labelling global labor arbitrage as "colonialism" always seem naive.
Naive from what perspective? I mean, look at the rise of the right- in the west that is also demanding that jobs be not shipped abroad, or "passed on to immigrants", so that "white people" don't face increasing unemployment. Note that this is becoming a dilemma for right- leaning politicians too because the right- also identifies with capitalism as part of its core ideology. I won't be surprised if a subsection of both the right- and the left- cite this paper, in the future, to bolster their own political arguments.
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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.
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.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.
> 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.
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0o4RhOtjQ
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.
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.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems cruel 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 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.
"Someone" == likely a brown person from a different country and certainly not simianwords.
>I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
The real reason you're arguing this is because you want to keep the flow of cheap, exploitative labor going because people who live in first world countries benefit from the downstream impacts.
"The spice must flow".
Who cares what the person describes themselves as. Do the claims being made validate with evidence, or not enough evidence, or are invalidated BY evidence?
If the claims are valid and provable, who cares about some label-bingo.
Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.
And that fact taints everything from the get-go.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
The difference lies in the power dynamic: if you don't like the terms, you can look elsewhere to find a better fit; if the employer doesn't like the terms, you may find yourself out of a job faster than you can replace it. For some people it may not be a big deal, but for many it's a significant factor in how hard they push for what they feel would be fair compensation.
No it's not necessarily, because employment is a repeated game with public information.
(Other people can see how much you're paying people by checking levels.fyi/blind/etc.)
There's better ways to motivate people anyway - thus tech companies pay with stock grants and performance bonuses.
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.
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.
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"
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.
It's preemptive union busting.
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.
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.
I work fully remote, by necessity. But it’s not better. I’m less in touch with everything going on inside and outside my teams, than I was when I was in-office 9-5.
It's silly to assume people are better at coordinating work in office.
It is about control, even if it's just about controlling how you interact with your coworkers.
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.
Why would they? The corporation is not their employer. Those people are not their coworkers.
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
How far we've come from everyone saying "WFH or we quit, its our right!"
I understood "customers" here to mean companies training AI models, buying human labor to assist with that.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
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.
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.
Then that's not colonialism, it's just modern day serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest.
Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like power over smaller and weaker countries, but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left.
But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're serfs of usury by the international banking system, which can be seen as a colonial power in a way, since no modern country can operate without it being part of it whether they want to or not.
that's definitionally colonilism under imperialism.
"but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left."
not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction. Nations that kick out the foreign influence under libertaory action often are sanctioned or invaded to try and topple them and revert to depedance on western intervention, but, when they succeed, rights and success often are much increased for the people in them, see "Human Rights in the USSR" by albert syzmenski, who uses only western sources for the book to steelman his position.
The western dependence happens through layers of coordinated and planned proxy vasselization. See the books "Unequal exchange" by Arghiri Emmanuel and "superimperilaism" by michael hudson for more details and scientific treatments of the question. "Inventing Reality" by Micheal Parenti might be another good read for you!
"But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it,"
Glad that one of the other sibling comments looked this quote up so I didn't have to. Fully "growing the scope:"
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
"Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest."
This distinction collapses under the scientific understandings of imperialism and colonialism, linked above in more detail.
When and where did that happen? When they were kicked out by force, radical nationalists took power on the basis of "kicking out the oppressors/colonizers" who 100% weren't puppets of the original colonizers, but the contrary.
Case in point North Korea, Cuba and Iran. Those regimes are 100% not US/UK puppets and yet they don't treat their people much nicer than under US/Western rule they revolted from.
USSR soviet Marxist communism was designed as a antithesis to US/western capitalism, and its workers ended up more oppressed than workers in the US, and the USSR was a world power, not a small powerless country like Cuba or Iran that could be bullied by US sanctions into poverty and submission, so its poverty was entirely self inflicted.
For the benefit of others, the correct spelling is: Szymanski.
Thank you for this voluminous comment, I'm reading through this and others that have been downvoted, and just wanted to show my appreciation, it's been insightful and educational. I've made notes of the books mentioned, and will be studying them over time.
Glad to have been helpful, thank you for engaging genuinely! Hope you find readings as informative as I did!
According to who?
Can I recommend a work by a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, that was concerned with this exact mechanism and described it in detail?
Let me know if any of this sounds at all relevant to the situation we find ourselves in:
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage...
If you did that on purpose, you brought up whataboutism.
- I aint playing your game diverting attention from my comment.
Could you rephrase your argument here? I'm having some trouble understanding this sentence fragment.
If you're trying to pull up some old trope about how people are choosing to get shit wages for shit work, then let me remind you that the alternative is starvation . Some fine choice.
> And you confused capitalism with colonialism.
I didn't confuse anything, I linked a famous piece of political theory positing they are interlinked phenomena.
> If you did that on purpose, you brought up whataboutism.
I'm also confused by what you are trying to say here. Who brought up whataboutism? I never spoke of it? Didn't you just bring it up? I'm confused.
> I aint playing your game diverting attention from my comment.
Nobody's diverting. I was directly engaging with it and providing some theory to further understanding and illustrate different perspectives on a term people sometimes get tripped up by.
It is telling you perceive anything but uncritical agreement as diversion. I would encourage you to bring the spirit of curiosity the guidelines call for.
Looking at the general definition of colonialism... .. .
Whether it's colonialism, economic arbritrage.. if this is so bad, happy to learn other options.
Jeez. The outrage-bait is dripping off of this sentence. Paying above the prevailing wage in a town for simple computer work, adding money to the local economy = extracting low-wage labor. It’s phrased like it’s sticking a syringe into Bangladesh and stealing their blood.
The fact that other people in that town are also being exploited doesn't make it any better.
Thing is, we tried the alternative. Quite a few times. The outcomes were considerably worse for everyone than capitalist economies.
How about they just don't treat their workers in the Global South as lesser than ones in rich countries, for starters?
When you say "lesser", isn't this just a question of regional pay disparity? Are you saying companies should be obligated to pay the same compensation in every region? Do you know how badly that would destroy the economies in the Global South?
Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
Exactly. That is precisely the financial imperialism I'm criticizing. Instead of gunboats, it is capital that puts the Global South into servitude.
> Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
This is structurally limited to a few places. By the very nature of the system we find ourselves in, you will always need somewhere to exploit, somebody to do the shit work for shit wages.
The pitch you're making is basically "if you're lucky, you can become an exploiter, too!". No. We have to end the exploitation.
> Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
Yes, now that Britain is rich enough, they make poorer people's kids work for them [0] [1]. That's exactly what people mean when they talk of colonialism as a form of capitalism.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tf6qc51Kbw
[1] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/ghana-br...
There exist 2 fairly good types of government-economical ties in this world, and both of which are fleetingly rare, with only one type actually growing consistently.
I would say they are, in no particular order, the "East Asian Values" model as created/noted by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and the Mondragon Corporation by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta.
The "East Asian Values" model is often used for Singaporean or Chinese style state capitalism, but the Japanese and Koreans have also had a similar economies, and Taipei has flirted with some part of it through TSMC (although they don't own the company outright). This model is pretty good for getting a country rich somewhat quickly, but it does implicate a strong central government.
The Mondragon Corp on the other hand, while technically a private sector business, it's a full Co-op owned by the workers themselves and has a lot of relations with the Spanish Government. This arguably is the less "exploitative" type of government-economical system, but it also implicates a semi-homogenous society, at least one high trust enough to reasonably and responsibly manage a co-op, even in the most rural areas of Basque Spain. The only other similar economies, perhaps are the Ayllu system in Peru, tequio in Mexico, or other often informal collectivist (but certainly not communist) systems.
It should be noted however, that although the Basques were extremely poor, Spain was still a European society, and as such, did commit a lot of gunboat economies, most notably the conquest of the Americas.
Wealth creation, by definition, is somewhat exploitative. The good news, is that this type of exploitation therefore, unlike colonialism, actually gives a lot of power to the exploited over time as wealth is created over time.
My (mostly indigenous) grandparents were lucky to have worked in factories in order to escape farm life, but there were multiple close calls. I imagine it's something similar with all Industrializing societies, wherein a nation commits to an almost Faustian bargain of getting wealth at the cost of brutal working hours. But at some point, "Fordist" thinking prevails, where people either through protests, unions, and also to increase overall economic consumption, people get paid more, they start to live more comfortable lives as many begin to focus on skilled labor and intellectual work. It's not a simple overnight process, but wealth creation does imply first-world like living conditions might come fairly soon to a lot of nations, especially those that started in mass production based factories.
It initially got an eye roll our of me, but it looks like the term that's been thrown around increasingly, and not entirely without cause. If the patterns, parallels, and impacts are close enough to make the comparison valid then it might be a more reasonable term than I expected. Colonialism doesn't necessarily require forced intervention or conquest. There are several definitions, but one would be the domination/exploitation of a people to serve a foreign power. By driving down wages, data harvesting through surveillance, and stealing natural resources tech companies are just as capable of exploiting and plundering as governments have been.
Its labor unions/movement that fund tech equity that provides database availability for the data visualization coming out of Brown.
It would make sense being that this is Brown with probably the most socially progressive view in the higher ed space. I didn't realize there was such a drive to tie this all together though.
On a similar note; I worked for a pathologist when I was in college. I saw and handled all types of body parts. I helped in the morgue. When I talked to people about it they felt bad for me. I loved it and made twice as much money as anyone else I knew working in college. It was a great deal. You quickly become desensitized to the parts people think are awful. Most people in healthcare that see crazy stuff can attest to this.
Sad part is the kid likley doesn't realize that.
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.
Also, do Chinese companies pay a higher rate? I have no idea. But Chinese data annotators also have to work with graphic content, I believe.
The workers are made to read bad things as part of AI training process, but they are adults agreeing to work in those things in exchange of pay, and they can always quit. The "workers" are computer literate English-speaking elites with stable internet connections even in poorer countries.
I have interacted with students from all over the world on different occasions. If I meet a student from India/US/China/Europe in a global research/academic/engineering forum, there is a non-trivial possibility that they are from a middle class or lower background, but when I meet, say, Africans, Bangladeshi people in the same places, they are almost always elites in their respective countries. It's not surprising, tbh.
My point it, when you are working for 4-5 USD per hour from Africa, you can communicate using good English, have a decent computer, have stable internet connection, a college degree, you are doing the AI work by choice.
Being paid by hours even in India is a great privilege where the culture is to make people work 10-12 hours shift for the pay of 8.
They say, "$2", I don't have any direct experience, but I saw ads for $4-$5 per hour, and that is for non-specialist work, and if you get steady work, you are paid more than "engineers" with 4 year degree at the end of the month.
In India, freshers Engineers in consultation shops get ₹30-40k per month, and have to be in office for 8-12 hours per day. Where 4$ per hour pay will get you 4$ * ₹95 * 8 hours per day * 5 days per week * 4 weeks per month = ₹60,800, which is enough for a comfortable middle class life (outside metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.). There is also no money to be paid for rent, commute, etc.
People getting into these positions are getting in by choice, and remaining by choice.
If they wanted to shed light on real woes, they should have focused on the small terms the workers are hired for. And work not being regular, people laid off on short notice, short term contracts, etc.
Seeing salary as well as prices in US dollars eyes is a common folly. This is what I believe is called "geo arb".
That all sounds nice and logical, but by the same reasoning weren't Epstein's victims getting in and remaining by choice?
Maybe the lucky ones get to work as domestics or laborers in the Middle East? I'm sure that's much better than reading AI slop in your home country with their children living with them and their friends and family nearby.
Now there are many other risks of AI associated with its ability to centralize power, lead to chaotic outcomes, etc, but that is disconnected from this somewhat mundane reality of how capitalism works. It seems like many opponents of AI are focusing on the wrong things, like how data centers apparently used more water than entire cities or turned the water supply brown.
Naive from what perspective? I mean, look at the rise of the right- in the west that is also demanding that jobs be not shipped abroad, or "passed on to immigrants", so that "white people" don't face increasing unemployment. Note that this is becoming a dilemma for right- leaning politicians too because the right- also identifies with capitalism as part of its core ideology. I won't be surprised if a subsection of both the right- and the left- cite this paper, in the future, to bolster their own political arguments.