The exploited labor behind artificial intelligence (2022)
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There's an old observation from Arthur C. Clarke, that sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. One thing that learning how magic tricks are performed taught me is that magicians typically do their fake magic by doing an unreasonable amount of work behind the scenes -- "magic" in the real world is often just doing a large amount of work that people don't realize is happening.
Given all that it seems appropriate that the new "real world magic" -- ML systems imitating intelligence -- really rest on a lot of hidden work by human beings. Just like magical devices like iPhones exist due to a lot of surprisingly cheap labor. Imagining otherwise is like imagining that the delicious food from a 3-star kitchen just appears from the chef's mind, without the help of all of the low-paid kitchen workers, farm workers, etc. that in reality do most of the work.
I've seen this in real life before, no need for a work of fiction.
I don’t think I am out on an intellectual limb believing very very few people would have seen an AI written book back then.
Reminiscent of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a current real-life example of exactly they.
This description alsp applies to mining toxic substances by hand and high-end prostitution.
The artisan cobalt-mining by hand is relatively popular, and kills you withing 10 years. It is not difficult to explot desperate people. I dont think we should be whitewashing it
If OpenAI had to pay more, they would have gone with another option. It's challenging to work across time zones, across cultures, across language barriers. Working with folks in Reno, NV or somewhere in the southern states of the US would have been the choice for OpenAI at a much higher price.
It's a competitive world. On the surface the Sama founder knew that and realized the options were higher wages for these folks in Africa, or none. The choice of even higher wasn't actually on the table.
In 2000~s rating agencies rated subprime mortgages as AAA-bonds, causing the global financial crisis. If they rated the bonds as junk, the banks would go to another rating agency. Its a competitive world.
Therefore defrauding all of us was the right thing to do?
Just because the problem is inherent in the system and you individually can't change it, does not mean you cannot acknowledge the system's fault's.
Competition driving costs down is viewed by many as a good thing. Many people view the higher wages the folks in this case got v their other opportunities as an opportunity, not as them being exploited. Capitalism is a system which some might not agree with, but pretending it's an obvious problem is wrong. Pretending low prices is an obvious problem is wrong. Many countries have explicitly chosen a capitalist system (competitive, market model where costs and prices are driven down) and have legislation and agencies devoted to protecting the system. Those countries aren't run by dictators.
Where did you learn that? I don't think it's at all true. It seems maybe you have a no-true-scotsman definition of 'exploited', so that no evidence against your claim would change your mind.
Picture a baker, who makes bread for people, who get bread, the baker gets money. Where is the necessary exploitation? I can't imagine where your confidence - "no exceptions" comes from. There are no win-win exchanges in the world, and none even possible? I'm not a huge fan of capitalism but that seems absurd.
Another way to describe business is that all business is about ripping someone off without pissing them off (and ideally making them happy). Middlemen who make their profit off margins are the most obvious example, but as I said this applies to all forms of business.
I reiterate: All business is about exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
All business is about taking advantage of someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
The baker is taking advantage of his customers' need/want for bread. The customers are taking advantage of the baker's need/want for money.
Businesses are organisations designed to systematically “exploit” trade to generate profit - which ends up in the hands of their customers (my tap got fixed), and the employees and owners in the form of money.
Healthy businesses have created all the wealth that exists. Let that sink in! Trade (usually through businesses) is the mechanism that has given us the bounty of modern life.
I also agree that capitalism is a demon we have summoned from beyond the veil that doesn’t truly care about us. Unbridled capitalism will overfish, send children into cobalt mines, and encourage bankers to commit fraud. As the economist says, we need healthy regulation to curb capitalism’s excesses.
But classifying it as entirely evil, or entirely exploitative is too much. If you really feel that way, try living without trading if you like. Sounds like a sure fire way to end up homeless. I wouldn’t last a day.
Business is about exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
Trade is about exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
Put another way, business is about obtaining someone else's time so you don't have to use yours.
You should stop applying pre(mis)conceptions and look at what business is objectively.
If you don’t mean to imply wrongness, then I’m not sure how your point of view is any different from mine. Trade is two people, mutually and consensually getting something they want from each other such that they’re both happier. If the only difference is your use of the word “exploit” but you mean it in a non-moralising way, sounds like we agree.
Business is exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions. Put another way, business is ripping someone off without pissing them off. Put another way, business is buying and selling time at a price that is acceptable. Ideally, business will culminate in all parties being happy.
If you think business or the act of exploiting something is "evil", or that capitalism is a "demon", that's your problem.
I'm describing business for what it is objectively. Some guy has a surplus of something you need/want, and you try and exploit that fact for your benefit. That is business.
You can die on that hill if you want, but "exploiting someone" has negative connotations in modern colloquial English. If a word doesn't fit what you're trying to communicate, use a different word or you will be misinterpreted.
> exploit (verb): 2. make use of (a situation) in a way considered unfair or underhand: the company was exploiting a legal loophole. (Oxford Dictionary of English)
>1
>: to make productive use of : UTILIZE
>exploiting your talents
>exploit your opponent's weakness
I would link to the Oxford English Dictionary, but apparently they demand I make an account and/or subscribe so that will have to wait for another day.
You have to go out of your way to associate negative connotations with the word "exploit", so please try again with your premisconceptions.
So your earlier comment should be read as:
> All business is about making productive use of someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions. The only question is whether that productive use is within tolerable limits.
... Except then that second sentence doesn't make sense now. If we take out the word "exploit", what are these "tolerable limits" of productive use you're pointing to? The original sentence read as if staying within "tolerable limits" is important to limit the implied harm we're doing by trading.
It reads like a motte-and-bailey argument[1] to me. Like what you're trying to say is this:
> All business is about exploiting ("1. to make productive use of / UTILIZE") someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions. The only question is whether that exploitation ("2. make use of (a situation) in a way considered unfair or underhand") is within tolerable limits.
When pushed on why you think business is dangerous you fall back on definition 1 of exploit. But then you lean on definition 2 of "exploit" to imply wrongness - "The only question is whether that productive use is within tolerable limits.". Or as another commenter wrote, "Are [workers] actually happy? Or are they exploited? That's the issue."
The blending together of these definitions feels slippery and underhanded. I don't care what word you use. Do you think trade is good or bad? Healthy or unhealthy for the participants?
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
Business transactions fundamentally rely on the parties concerned coming to an agreement in order to proceed. If the parties are not in agreement, which is to say if the exploitation (aka the terms of the transaction) is not within "tolerable limits", the business transaction cannot proceed.
Therefore, and I reiterate: All business is about exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions. The only question is whether that exploitation is within tolerable limits.
>When pushed on why you think business is dangerous
I have never said nor implied such a thing.[1][2]
This is absolutely wrong, there is a whole field of economics studying trade and you should read at least about comparative advantage. In healthy economy trade is for mutual benefit.
In fact, most business transactions are mutually beneficial through no particular impetus from the parties: One party gets whatever goods or services he needed/wanted, the other party gets whatever monies he needed/wanted; both parties are hopefully better off and happier than before.
I reiterate: Business is about exploiting someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
Given the controversy over the word "exploit", do you mind restating your belief without using the word "exploit" to make sure we all understand what you mean? Is this a fair restating?
> I reiterate: Business is about making productive use of someone somewhere for your benefit, no exceptions.
Your inability to comprehend plain English is not a controversy nor is it my problem.
Even though most of the time "exploiting an opportunity" is neutral and "exploiting our workers" is either a scam or abuse, I have seen some texts that used the word in the same sense for both cases.
You can say it's OpenAI's duty to make sure all these things don't happen. But they are not there to police the local society. They are there to run their own business. They don't have the competency to make sure corruption does not happen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34426421 (570 comments)
(Warning: Shitshow)
I think it's clear exploitation when you offer someone employment that adversely impacts their rights. So artisan cobalt-mining is exploitative, because of it's health effects, would go against the UN's definition of "the right to work in just and favourable conditions"[1]. However, I'm not sure what, if any, rights are being compromised by the topic in the article. Maybe there's a case that it's unjust because of the asymmetry in the value created and payment. If there are some rights abuses, then it becomes a clearly exploitative endeavor.
Impossible to know but I expect she would not have stayed out of the Syrian war.
It was she who was largely responsible for the debacle in Lybia
So Karen on using all that power and such a short term thinker
Trump was a catastrophe for you in the USA but not really for us.
Please elect an isolationist....
There's something weirdly racist about the idea that only people in the west (or American diplomats) have any agency in the world. That America somehow is so powerful that y’all created the modern world. That local people and local leaders have no capacity for determining their own future.
That corruption in the police in South Africa is America’s fault. That the problem of gangs in Mexico was created by the US and that the Mexican gang members are blameless when they decapitate people. That Americans were the people who voted in Bolsenaro. Or the west are responsible for Japanese aggression in WW2.
Maybe ending colonial ideas starts at home.
Outsourced factory jobs are the mechanism by which previously poor countries like Taiwan and China (in many ways) have been pulled out of poverty. The process is happening before our eyes in Vietnam right now.
Do you think you’re doing poor people a favour by denying them well paid jobs? Should we do the same in the west, and have companies fire all our poorest employees?
I can hardly think of a more cruel policy.
You aren't understanding the meaning of "exploitation". See the GP.
> both parties walk away happy
Are they actually happy? Or are they exploited? That's the issue.
> You aren't understanding the meaning of "exploitation". See the GP.
My question stands regardless of the meaning of the word "exploitation". I didn't use that word in my question. - Which I note you dodged answering. Who is worse off? Can you point to them?
>> both parties walk away happy
> Are they actually happy? Or are they exploited? That's the issue.
Why are they mutually exclusive? If being exploited isn't something with negative connotations, why can't I be "exploited" and be happy at the same time? If I hire a plumber to fix my leaky sink, who cares what the definition of the word exploited is? He's happy for the work, and I'm happy for my sink being fixed. We all walk away better off.
Was he exploited? Was I? Who cares when its consensual and we're both better off?
This argument about what "exploit" means seems pointless and unrelated to the actual topic - which seems to be, is it moral to hire someone in a poor country to do work for you. My claim is that not sending work to poor countries is often even more cruel - because it keeps people in poverty.
Exploitation is not a pointless issue; it harms many millions, maybe billions of people.
The options are not only A) Exploit people, or B) Don't hire anyone. We can and should hire them in ways that aren't exploitative.
Uhm actually :) the AI definietly writes the text itself, and takes care of Nell, and senses the environment around itself, but for plot reasons it can’t do voice synthesis. So it employs humans to read up the words. At least until Nell learns to read.
So it is not just appears, but it is in fact an AI, with a veneer of human voice on it.
And also inspiration for Amazon's Mechanical Turk. [0]
Given that, it seems to be a clear miss to apply that logic generally. I have to believe it most likely stems from a lack of basic understanding and competence on the authors part.
Edit: Here are two examples that I have personally worked on:
Global calculations of weather composite reflectivity using 20 years of historical satellite imaging data from NASA
Superior RF demodulation (under certain circumstances) using RF transmissions as received and sent.
Both of these utilize modern ML imaging models, neither require any human labeling only streaming data (which in these cases began collection long before modern ML techniques were in widespread use). The applications in the natural sciences are endless not to mention the applications more on the business intelligence side using transactional data. Only in specific cases is human labeling required but because of the high cost of that data it is by its nature dwarfed by that which is collected naturally (not to mention often error prone). It is for that reason that techniques to ingest data that is more and more natural to collect are growing in favor.
That is unlikely, given that one of the authors is Timint Gebru. I'm quoting below select passages from her wikipedia page indicating her background:
In 2001, Gebru was accepted at Stanford University.[2][5] There she earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering[8] and her PhD in computer vision[9] in 2017.[10] Gebru was advised during her PhD program by Fei-Fei Li.[10]
Gebru presented her doctoral research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists present their work to members of industry and venture capitalists. Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.[11][12]
Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless," and well-liked by her colleagues
Regardless, my point still stands, they completely ignore (willingly or ignorantly) that human labeled data is not intrinsic to ML or even the algorithms themselves and in all likelihood is a small minority of datasets used by modern ML applications. To then apply that critique generally to ML shows ignorance and a misunderstanding of the ecosystem.
Gebru presented her doctoral research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists present their work to members of industry and venture capitalists. Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.[11][12]
And to the fact that she got her PhD in computer vision, i.e. the main area of AI research that the article seems to be criticising.
Her PhD research is in computer vision and she and her co-authors are writing mainly about computer vision, but you spoke of "a lack of basic understanding and competence on the authors part". That is clearly incorrect and I don't understand what saying the same thing many times will change about that.
I probably heard this in a Penn & Teller interview, but the idea is much older... One of the keys to making a good illusion is to put far more work into it than people would think is reasonable, so it won't occur to them to think along the lines of what you actually did.
It could make sense from an environmental perspective to produce and consume locally but for a job like this, the only reason to use US nationals would be to create local jobs.
Edit: I asked ChatGPT to write it for me:
Write me a story in the style of The Onion about a third world kid who worries the he is exploiting the young programmers in first world countries who make the games he plays
Headline:
Third World Child Struggles with Guilt over Exploiting First World Game Developers
Story:
In a small village in a developing country, a young boy named Ahmed sat huddled over his tablet, playing the latest mobile game. As he tapped away at the virtual farm, building and expanding his virtual empire, a feeling of guilt began to gnaw at him.
Ahmed couldn't shake the feeling that the game he was enjoying so much was built on the backs of exploited programmers in first world countries. He knew that the developers of the game were likely working long hours for low pay, all so that he, a third world child, could have a few moments of entertainment.
As the guilt grew stronger, Ahmed tried to put the game down, but found himself unable to resist its allure. He knew that he was complicit in the exploitation of his fellow human beings, but he couldn't bring himself to stop playing.
"I know it's wrong, but I just can't help it," Ahmed said, tears streaming down his face. "I wish there was a way to enjoy the game without feeling guilty."
As the sun set over Ahmed's village, the young boy made a silent vow to do whatever it takes to make sure that the game developers are treated fairly and compensated for their hard work. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he was determined to make a difference, even if it meant sacrificing his own enjoyment of the game."
Ahmed's story is a reminder that in today's globalized world, the actions of one person can have a ripple effect that extends far beyond their immediate surroundings. While it may be easy to enjoy the latest mobile game or app, it's important to remember that behind every pixel is a team of hardworking individuals who deserve fair treatment and compensation for their labor.
If you want to be an early India user (paid) put an email in your bio and I'll get in touch. If you can program though data labeling might not be the best use of your time.
Like "ok now that OpenAI Inc has a basic AI, lets be sure to close the door behind us so we don't have to deal with competing startups"
If your ethical conundrum is between continuing to allow the exploitation of the post-colonial third world, and to stifle competition in first world markets, I think you need to retake an ethics class because that is not a conundrum.
*And here’s where I digress to say, again, that, indeed if you are the single mother of a child with a heart condition wholly reliant on the expensive company health care not lapsing for even a minute lest your child not just die but literally explode, taking your whole family and half the neighborhood with them, I’m not judging you. If, on the other hand, you’re a single dude between 20 and 35 with a college degree, significant assets, no debt, and a sellable skillset, yes, you’re the one I’m judging.
And yes, somebody has to do the dirty work.
But we don't even know the countries that are being used! So we're back to the original question: is it a little? A lot? Average? Honestly, when I see people spout out raw numbers alarm bells go off in my head. Doesn't matter if it is wage, number of car crashes, or number of murders. We have so many fucking people on this planet that a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. There are definitely people using this in deceitful manners. There are also dumb people, but idiocracy can still be accidentally malicious. The reason it is easy to lie with statistics and data is because it is actually really difficult to compare numbers and data across differing conditions. In this case, it really does not make sense to compare the wages of an American to the wages of a Sri Lankan. The price of an apple in both places isn't equal.
Still, I don't know the answer to my question.
If your goal is to actually help people in a country get out of poverty this is actually quite a difficult goal to achieve without taking over that country (implicitly or explicitly). We don't want to physically invade. We don't want to economically invade. But we also don't want them to sit in poverty so we have to do something right? So how do you do that and let them maintain their independence? They might not even want to work with us to begin with! Don't pretend that these are trivial problems and us westerners sitting at a computer just know what's best. That's how colonialism started in the first place.
The two problems with trying to save the world via AI are the cheapest self driving car is a passenger train driven by "too cheap to automate" human, and an economy based on AI will be too poverty stricken from wealth inequality to permit the AI to generate a profit thus AI is not needed thus no need to destroy everything by applying AI.
The more AI is deployed, the poorer an economy will become, and the cheaper labor will become, making it quite a race to see if the AI gets smarter faster than economic activity implodes.
The most likely outcome of AI boosterism will be something like the environmentalist movement, but anti-AI. Who will be "The Lorax" of anti-AI?
If true information induces feelings in you, perhaps it's more constructive to reflect on the information rather than the motives of the reporter?
Like the movie says: there is no conspiracy. Big brother is not watching you. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
The Sun, positive: https://mobile.twitter.com/rainey_knight/status/161239752558...
The Mirror, positive: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/prince-harry-confirms-...
The Sun, negative: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21085974/piers-morgan-harry-ta...
The Mirror, negative: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/royals/army-fury-prince-harry-...
A simple phrasing like this does not reflect the reality of humanities evolution and resulting biology. We're social creatures, requiring that others make us feel things: https://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror
Unless you're a psychopath, perhaps: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321839
The size of the advertising industry suggests otherwise.
This in 2023, when people feel offended by anything, sounds pretty off...
It'll make a cottage industry of "data made in the USA"
It continues to answer the question: can the west run without maintaining a dedicated underclass -- no.
Should we be paying even less to make sure that we can keep that going? If those people get richer, these systems that benefit us will stop working
It's important, in my opinion, to always ask 'who benefits from me believing this?'
What you did have was increasing skepticism that things like fully-realized door-to-door autonomous driving were going happen in the short-run--but a lot of the skeptics didn't think that would necessarily translate into an AI winter.
> who benefits from me believing this?
In the case of this article, presumably the exploited* laborers whose labor conditions might improve if the population to whom this article is addressed both became aware and started to care about the labor conditions of the people behind the systems they use. Trying to 4D chess ourselves into not having to actually address the issue at hand isn’t clever or insightful, it’s just abdication with numbers attached.
* I’m not arguing whether or not the behavior described in the article actually constitutes exploitation or is just the noble hand of the market more perfectly forming working conditions - that’s not my point. The point is if you DO read the article and you DO feel that behavior’s exploitative, scratching your head over who’s got an agenda to want this thing you find abhorrent changed, as opposed to trying to change the behavior you find abhorrent, is the kind of thing people think smart people are supposed to do, and tends to contribute to more things you find abhorrent happening in the world.
FTA:
>"MMC Ventures surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use AI in a meaningful way."
While not the same as an AI winter, it can still be indicative of "peak hype". If accurate, a large portion of companies are claiming to have some nebulous AI advantage aren't really delivering on that promise. It's doesn't have to be astroturfing to be pointing out a hype machine. Particularly if that hype is predicated on a shaky ethical foundation.
Probably the best example here [0].
[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
1. Companies standards would be much higher if classification was done by engineers paid engineering salaries. And engineers would be directly accountable for model biases instead of bias being excused on the basis of how sausage gets made.
2. Outsourcing classification explicitly means classification is not valuable as a core competency; not an area in which expertise is important; and not an activity deserving of the benefits of direct employment such as financial rewards correlated to business success (e.g. bonuses, raises, options, etc.).
> labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems
Yes, because workers' rights and AI Ethics are two separate issues. It seems the author is using the fact that AI ethics is a thing as a "gotcha" against AI companies, because they treat their workers unethically according to them.
> In this article, we [...] argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics.
And even if you shoved workers rights into AI ethics; How do you organize labor for a job where there's an unlimited pool of people worldwide who would take the job in an instant with minimal training required most likely, making pretty much the whole workforce instantly replaceable?
> These corporations know that increased worker power would slow down their march toward proliferating “AI” systems requiring vast amounts of data, deployed without adequately studying and mitigating their harms.
> If corporations are not allowed to exploit labor from Kenya to the U.S., for example, they will not be able to proliferate harmful technologies as quickly — their market calculations would simply dissuade them from doing so.
Here it's suddenly about actual AI ethics again with the idea that progress needs to be artificially slowed down in order to ensure ethical implementation. Increasing the "unethically low" data labeling wages has the added benefit of slowing down the "unethical" development of AI.
> Talk of sentient machines only distracts us from holding them accountable for the exploitative labor practices that power the “AI” industry.
It really just looks like a weird ramble where the author picked a popular topic and then grasped at straws to draw lines to their political agenda with some luddism sprinkled on top.
We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.
Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.
Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_histor...
That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.
It'd be nice to see some sources for the quoted pamphlets, but if we assume that they are actual quotes from primary source material, it's quite telling.
The article does get a lot wrong, e.g. conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism (hunting was been controlled by central political authorities for centuries before the industrial revolution).
But there's also a good point being made, that breaking up communal economic systems can be used as a tool of subjugation and control. There's nothing in here about self-sufficiency or subsistence per se.
There's plenty of actually problematic stuff (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution without taking the view that peasantry was a particularly pleasant lifestyle that nobody would volunteer to change.
There is historical precedent for social biases being developed in order to justify economic and political institutions. It's often said for example that this is where modern racism comes from, a moral workaround for the obvious immorality of the Atlantic slave trade.
Thus, the presence of some kind of social or cultural bias might be a useful indicator of the presence of a developing or existing socioeconomic/political power dynamic.
I think self-sufficiency is a red herring here. Maybe the author was taken in by some kind of Marxist pre-industrial pastoral fantasy, but that doesn't mean they didn't make some good points along the way.
The industrial revolution was already starting at that point. We associate the industrial revolution with machinization, but it was in fact translation of old feudal modes of land ownership to the entire economy. This trend started with the wool trade and the feudal lords finding wool trade more profitable than feudal land ownership. Coupled with the new modes of economic organization created during the Age of Exploration (corporations, stocks), this removed the incentive for the feudal aristocracy to maintain farming as a means of income and pushed them to maximize their revenue by moving to various emerging trades, with wool trade being the first. The pushing out of the peasants from the commons started around that time. What extra happened during the period that is directly labeled as the Industrial Revolution is just using the same method to push the peasantry into factories.
They are precisely the same - the ownership structures of modern capitalism already existed in the form of ownership of non-land resources (roads, mines, water passages, even buying/selling rights of specific commodities) in the middle ages and then with the invention of corporations at the start of the age of exploration, they were fully fleshed out as the things we know today. From shareholders to stock market, from rights to own and use anything to transferrable concepts.
Industrial revolution has been merely the machinization of the already existing structure.
Working in an iron foundry or steelworks is more peacefull than quetly living on a farm? There is less conflict between workers than farmers?
What is the basis for this fantasy?
This was not the case prior to industrialization. You have some idyllic pastoral fantasy in mind, which was not true.
One big hole in your argument - mexican cartels. Modern industrial society, loads of collaboration inside the cartel, very violent people achieve massive success. I am confident that life of a medieval farmer was far less violent that living with a violent cartel.
Can you actually bring any empirical evidence that victorian-age factory life was more peaceful than agrarian life 100 years prior? I think you are engaging in self-delusion, or comparing today to 500 years ago - which is unfair
Indeed. Also missing from the picture is the violence inherent in the system - the majority shareholders, ceos and execs of healthcare corporations that deny people treatment if they cant pay are inflicting much more violence than the tyrants of the past - its systemic, all-encompassing without any discrimination as to its target. But because the violent part is outsourced to the state's police to kick out and keep out those who cant pay, its magically 'not violent'. Whereas its possibly the worst systemic violence that ever invented in human history.
There is no 'collaboration' in industrial slums. Its machinized slavery.
> Commies are wild.
From the other perspective, your knee-jerk dismissal of the widely known and discussed 'tragedy of the commons' sounds like a religious fundamentalism. Especially to non-Americans.
The people of the age openly described what was happening, criticized it and lamented what they lost. The perpetrators of the act had no qualms in openly declaring their intentions and doing what they declared, because they openly and actually proudly thought that was the way it should be.
The social awareness that we have today was not present in those ages - back then peasants had to 'know their place' and 'their betters' had all the right to do whatever they pleased with what they owned. So they had no problem in openly declaring things that we would find as sociopathic today.
If what you read in that small bit of article shocks and surprises you, wait until you read the actual memoirs of the aristocrats and industrialists from that age...
Transitions suck for the people left behind, but that doesn't mean that progress is bad, it can really help people overall.
Technology and science changed the living standards. Not capitalism or industrial revolution by themselves. In fact, average age for adults was already within 60-70 range before the industrial revolution - what brought down the averages was children dying early. Medicine during scientific revolution solved that. In that period, every bit of knowledge was being shared openly by everyone, entire science and technology was open source.
In fact Capitalist mode of economics has changed that. It pushed patents, and it started to monopolize and control science and technology starting from the latter part of the 19th century. That is also why the pace of scientific progress slows down around that time.
I'm not trying to stuff AI back into Pandora's box. It's here, and it's coming. It can be a really great thing, or it can be catastrophic. So I mostly agree with your last point. But it we're going to talk about learning from our mistakes, the industrial revolution gave us The Jungle, and Amazon, and the obliteration of The Amazon.
Things didn't work out for the best; many of them worked out horribly. And things that did work out did so because the road was paved with human bodies (and tens of billions of nonhuman bodies).
Surely in the vast universe of past human discovery it seems likely if post-scarcity were possible in any form, that we'd have already discovered what will initiate post-scarcity so it should be here now... and it seems unlikely that any individual invention in the future will kick it off if none of the past inventions did.
Additionally I would say that each advance brought us closer to post scarcity. We have close to eliminated extreme poverty globally. Compared to hunter gatherer society’s we already live post scarcity.
Finally we may very well be post scarcity, but the notion of nobility in work and morality of labor means we can’t yet seriously consider decoupling work from life necessities. At some point there won’t be enough bullshit jobs left to justify pretending people need to labor to eat, and society will either collapse or we will move beyond work to live.
I would posit however the invention left undone is the one we use humans for now. Their ability to reason, make independent decisions, synthesize new ideas in any situation, learn new and different skills, interacting with a complex field of visual, auditory, and sensory stimulus effectively towards a goal, etc. That’s why we research AI. If our tools have that, then our tools don’t need us. If our tools don’t need us, we don’t have to do the work. If we don’t have to do the work, there is no scarcity because work scales independent of us.
There are also other inventions we know of but haven’t perfected that help here. Efficient fusion is one. With that energy is cheap and plentiful and presumably clean. Energy is the ability to do work. With artificial minds that can produce minds that can in turn produce minds, fueled with plentiful energy, what’s left?
So I disagree that we’ve invented everything that might be useful, or that what hasn’t yet been invented won’t lead to improved productivity to the point that human labor is redundant and all human needs can be met without it.
Being called a 'Luddite' was NEVER about technology, but whom gains from technology.
And I dare-say he was right in his concerns. The gains of technology are privatized by the owner class, even though we worker class are the ones who utilize them. One needs to look no further than the "gig economy".
Luddites were the victims of a very successful smear campaign.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
'It works out in the long run' is BS, and is always applied to someone else.
They use AI, "so-called AI", or "AI" (with scare quotes) interchangeably. Besides being unnecessarily confusing with their own terminology, they are bringing in a pointless philosophical debate about what "intelligence" or "learning" really is. The "40% of AI startups that don't actually use any AI" is mentioned not because they're misleading investors or users, but because they point out that the "AI" label makes workers less visible, and then they can tie that to Amazon's "artificial artificial intelligence" and go on from there to show or at least imply that pretty much all AI is a big smokescreen to justify the marginalization of workers.
However... isn't that begging the question? Do we actually care whether these systems learn and think the same way humans do, do their own original work, or whether they're just a worker pretending to be a chatbot? Does that make it okay to underpay gig workers, give them PTSD, or subject them to poor conditions?
Maybe "real AI" never materializes, but also maybe it just keeps improving until it doesn't matter. If so it's dangerous to deny that these systems can ever meaningfully replace or augment humans. We can't pretend that we live in a universe where something will forever be inferior to good old-fashioned human labor just because of the disturbing social implications.
As per everyone in employment.
First clause of first sentence falsely posits that the "public" has a single mind, and claims the authors know the contents of this mind and what causes it to acquire these contents. It also adopts a false pose of authority and and understanding superior to that of the (nonexistent) mind of the public. It was nice of the authors to disqualify themselves from offering worthy ideas on the topic of AI so early in the article.
I never said anything like that.
Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing.
Seems hard to say this on one hand and allow for useful generalizations on the other.
> Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing
Off the bailey and into your motte
That's another misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my words, which were just making a separate point (could have been a top-level comment).
The "popular" in pop culture and the "public" in publics understanding are referring to the same thing, so I don't understand your confusion. The only thing that's really being implied by the sentence is that scientific understanding doesn't dominate the public understanding of artificial intelligence as much as pop culture does.
Amazon apparently pays around $25/hour to its starting warehouse workers. That’s 1k per week for 40 hours per week, or around 4k/month. That’s more than what French government pays its rocket scientists. People can discover their market rates based on their skills, and are free to work for another employer. There is no lock down.
I was about to call bullshit but then looked up the average salary for an aeronautical engineer in France and it was… bleak.
Give these crybabies what they claim to want: fire all those Kenyans and stop gimping chatgpt under the guise of not wanting to use exploitative labor practices. Rub their faces in it. You can't win with these people, don't even try.
And as a little bonus for the crybabies, when are you going to realize you're tools being used in corporate warfare? You think it's a coincidence that these articles are being written about an up and coming company running circles around the established big boys? Do you like being a tool?
Ironic comment.
>Rub their faces in it
None of that's gonna happen. Deal with it, lol.
Thanks to that experience, I now make 100x more.
If it were progressive liberals, sitting in their comfort home, trying to protect me, I would have been totally not exposed to the amazing opportunity this 'exploitative capitalistic company' gave me and literally changed my life and people around me forever.
Woke Mind Virus is real and a cancer to real progress
I got about $1 / hour from Otis and would have violently opposed anyone trying to "protect me" from that job.
The idea that they should have paid me $10 / hour instead (or whatever "fair" number in line with US wages) is laughable. Such fabulously sweet job would have been immediately snatched up by my boss' boss, or someone from their family – I'd never even hear of it.
Sometimes I wonder whether I'm going to go from being amazed that ChatGTP3 can write wonderful javascript programs, to waking up one day inside of a "data labeling" company where I'm writing Javascript programs as fast as I can for $1.73 a pop.
This has nothing to do with real AI and instead this author is trying to pass off hacks and gapfills as an entire industry or pursuit for the purpose of manufacturing suffering or abuse that isn't there.
This author has a terrible perspective.
If we have to enslave the whole world for 1 year to build an AI that elevates all for eternity. Would you do it?
I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues in the article.
Using your analogy, the article is asking the question: "if we have to continually enslave entire nations to build an AI that a single private corporations benefits directly from, and individuals in first world countries benefits indirectly from. Would you do it?"
The reason it's unethical is because of the system of exploitation we live in. So to answer your question yes, if we remove that system of exploitation and everyone benefits equally after suffering equally for a year I would "press that button" so to speak. The problem is that's not the reality for AI and those who work to support it.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
You can say this exact thing about capitalism as a whole. Children working in coltan mines and on cocoa plantations and such.
It feels a bit superficial to write articles that just jump on some cool tech bandwagon just to point out that this tech is also exploitative. Because nearly everything is. And in case of that specific tech it's probably not that bad when compared to children in coltan mines.
It's a feature of our economy that we, well off people, all benefit from, our entire life.
We'd have to change entire rules of engagement and who's gonna pay to make that happen? We are not going to change it by playing whack-a-mole with global behemoths.
I don't quite understand your final point. Yes, changing the labour relations globally would require global changes.
> Who's gonna pay to make that happen?
It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour. Why is it assumed that they can continue to shoulder the majority of the work for the minority of the benefits, but the idea that the work and benefits should be spread more evenly is abhorrent?
It just feels cheap and even less effective than other approaches. It promotes a whack-a-mole mindset.
> It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour.
Ah, I see your misunderstanding. I didn't mean that somebody will bear the cost of a change. I meant that for any change to happen somebody must pay out of their ears for political influence to force that change.
The only maeningful laws that come into power are laws that somebody bought. Who's gonna buy 'non-exploitation' law if everybody with any money (billionaires, but also you and me) benefits from this exploitation?
Want to solve the problem? Figure a way how someone can earn big money on preventing exploitation of people.
This is the problem with ideas like yours, there is no practical plan on offer to create the reality you are advocating for. Yet, you expect these people who are suffering right now to just sit tight. Its narcissism.
Let's try this with another Idea:
Person A - I am protesting to end slavery / Fix climate change / stop cops killing people for being black or poor
Person B - You have no detailed plan how to achieve this, you are a narcissist!
How are so many comments in this thread so far detached from the real world?
It's quite a dangerous mindset to think that taking freedom away from other people is a good thing because you know better.
In some cases you will be correct. In others, millions will die.
And in the average case nothing happens. There's no reason to think it's a barbell shaped distribution with outcomes weighted towards the extremes.
Further, it's not a trap-door decision, and it's not a decision that leads to instant death and despair. If it becomes problematic, it's quite straightforward to reverse course.
On average, casino players lose a little bit of money. But with a gambler mindset, you lose everything.
> If it becomes problematic, it's quite straightforward to reverse course.
And yet two of the worst famines in the last century were not reversed.
This isn't a casino.
> And yet two of the worst famines in the last century were not reversed.
That's actually not really the right way of looking at it. You're measuring the things that did happen without measuring the things that didn't happen. How many were stopped? How many were stopped by the Farm Bill alone?
I'm not actually sure which of the famines you're referring to but if you're referring to the Holodomor, it was intentional.
I'm not that versed in US governing. Which freedoms is Farm Bill taking away and how does that prevent famines?
> if you're referring to the Holodomor, it was intentional
It's a controversial topic, but regardless - it still correlates with the mindset that some kind of central authority knows better what's good for people. Better than people themselves.
You know, since we're dealing in hypotheticals.
This does bring up an important long term market point. If there are an essentially infinite number of people willing to drive a car for practically nothing, tell me again why do we need self driving cars as an example of AI? Its not like we're running out of poor people anytime soon, they don't cost much of anything, so why waste all that money on kicking the poor people out of the economy? Eventually, once everyone's kicked out of the economy, there won't be anyone left to buy the very expensive self driving cars anyway, and no one will need self driving cars because they'll be nowhere economically viable left to drive to. Certainly we can "self reproduce" car drivers much cheaper than we can produce self driving cars full of unobtainable microprocessors, and producing human drivers is much more "black swan" proof than producing globalist microprocessors.
The other problem is a economy, in the long run, has to serve its participants. Lets say as a thought experiment its inevitable that all capital and all economic activity will solely be concentrated in those with IQs over 150 or sociopathic tendencies or outright criminality, and of course with everyone else kicked out of the economy they will be the sole beneficiaries of AI, much like the European Royalty was, in some sense, the the only beneficiary of gold mining industry. Well... won't 99% of the population go all French Revolution on them and fire up the guillotines? As soon as those people at the top of the pyramid are removed, and there won't be too many of them, the 99% of the population can go back to happy productivity. Any individual who rebels during the runup will get steamrolled by the rest of their competitors who don't rebel from the plan, but the endpoint of the plan is anyone cooperating with the plan to the inevitable endpoint will get the guillotine in the end, so what's the maximally efficient game theory perspective if you're trapped in a self destructive game where either total participation or obvious non-participation results in your demise? Well, everyone's better off if everyone "phones it in" and fails. So I expect a lot of "totally unexpected" AI failures.
Another philosophical problem is we've run a repeated massively parallel experiment on producing smarter better educated "non-artificial" intelligence entities known as the university system, etc. It really hasn't worked out other than the usual primate dominance ritual purposes and making certain the people at the top stay at the top. But people seem to think if we emulate that nonsense that never worked in a computer, it'll work next time. Sort of like perpetual motion doesn't work IRL out in the real world but if you abuse a CAD/CAM program hard enough a simulation of perpetual motion will work in a computer ... but even if we fake it in a computer simulation, that STILL doesn't mean it'll work IRL. Its almost like a "heisenberg uncertainty principle" of AI where if we had AI it seems the universe routes around it such that it can't make a net profit. Kind of like burning two barrels of crude oil to grow one barrel of ethanol to replace a barrel of crude oil, graph that out and see where it leads?
I'm just saying, if "low IQ" biologicals are already economically excluded, why would "low IQ" AIs not also be economically excluded? And we've proven we can't educate "better" biologicals, so trying to produce a master race of AIs is likely to fail just as badly as those past experiments.
Um, no. Google was using machine learning more than 15 years ago, notably in the SmartASS system that predicts whether someone will click on an ad [1]. I got my cousin Missy a gig (at $15 an hour) rating ads and search results.
This story is hardly a claim of humane treatment of gig workers, I should note. I intervened and got her treated fairly.
> Companies make sure to hire people from poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as contractors rather than as full time employees.
Citations, please. A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population.
If you want to design something that appeals to Americans, you want American raters. Since the US is by far the largest consumer of Internet services, it stands to reason most raters of "quality" will need to be from the US.
If you just want to know if an image contains objectionable content, then yes, you could use Third World employees.
[1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
Any 'ai' model right now requires classified data to train. It takes human work to classify data. Human work is cheaper in some places than others, so companies in expensive places exploit the situation of poorer places to lower their operating costs.
The wage size compared to the local economy doesn't really matter, since the exploitation comes from the difference in costs between the local economy and the local economy of the company.
In your reality, how is the data getting classified if not by people whose situation is being exploited?
To me, using people in disadvantaged situations to reduce your operating costs is inherently exploitative.
Why doesn't money grow on trees? Why does inflation exist? Why are some nations wealthy and other nations poor? Why are some nations at different points in their economic, social, civil, and technological development? Why is the sky blue?
Are you trolling or do you seriously not understand how fancifully inane this question is?
This is silly. Rents and product costs are low too in those countries.
Are consumers exploiting business owners there by this logic?
1. Humans are not fungible in this way, as much as some people wish that they were. The ML models we built in my workplace were fed classified data that was built using some of the most expensive labor in the company, because of the highly specialized nature of the model. It would have been impossible to train using Mechanical Turk.
2. Taking money from wealthy countries and putting it into the economy of poor countries by paying an outsized local wage in the poor country that is cheap in the wealthy country, thus lifting up the poor country, is a very interesting way to classify "exploitation" (see: Asia and Eastern Europe).
> In your reality, how is the data getting classified if not by people whose situation is being exploited?
In your reality, apparently it's only acceptable for a company that would pay a First World worker $20/hr to do classification to also pay a Third World worker $20/hr to do classification, rather than $2/hr, which is an outsized compensation in a local market where people generally get $2/DAY, rather than per hour.
In my reality, BILLIONS of people have been lifted out of abject poverty by foreign investment dollars that arbitraged labor costs, to massively improve the economic situation and quality of life of those foreign workers.
Weirdly, my reality aligns with actual facts.
"People" are not all the same. I just explained why US workers are preferred or even required for a lot of ML tasks. Did you read that?
As for exploitation, I'll limit myself to noting that certain people are always finding it whenever a rich person hires a poor person, despite the fact that nearly all jobs arise this way.
Interestingly that isn’t actually the case. I would guess most data used in ML is not human labeled specifically because it is so expensive and error prone. For example, most work done in the natural sciences simply utilize sensor data. Want to forecast some aspect of the weather? Grab a couple decades of historical data collected by weather sensors. None of that needs to be human labeled, only sensor collected. Some applications certainly do rely on manually human labeled data but not all, and I would personally guess only a minority of applications because of the difficulty in collection.
Many ML models dealing with human interaction do need a human to provide the ground truth. More and more these days you can probably find corpuses of data already labelled, so you don't have to collect it afresh.
Please don't say that, it is upsetting that this false assumption thrown around so carelessly. At least check the authors' profiles, say on Wikipedia, if you want to know how much they understand.
An excellent point.
Why not just argue the criticism on its merits, rather than complaining that criticism shouldn't be allowed at all?
It takes no skill to critique.
We have a whole group of people who are so concerned with what's already built and building more and more onto it, that any attempt to point out where they went wrong in the foundation is met with criticisms like "all you people want to do is tear things down" and "well if your foundation is so good then why haven't you built as much as us".
Look at the whole phenomenon of critical theories, especially critical race theory. People were so enraged by the prospect of having the foundations questioned that the actual criticisms were less important.