Wish them the best but they only have their jobs because of outsourcing— they’re the cheapest labor available. Ask for too much and the jobs will go to India or anywhere else.
1. Their job easily replaceable by any english speaking, high school educated worker on a planetary level.
2. There is almost no capital expenditure to setup a 'moderation centre', just setup a bunch of computers in an office and you are done. So workers don't have leverage over a company that is unwilling to move.
3. AI will annihilate probably 80% of the offshore call center business in a few years, the workers laid off from call centers, can 1-1 slot into these AI-RL training jobs. Heck AI will also annihilate 80% of those offshore moderation jobs for say facebook. So more competition.
Frankly, the AI companies doesn't even need to move to another country, they can just hire non-unionized workers in those same african countries. When they will do this, depends on when the union asks for too high of a wage.
The most optimistic outcome, is the unions try to work with the AI companies in asking for better conditions, but not neccessarily much better wages. Overplay their hand and they will fail.
2. Their leverage is their sanity and willingness to be able to be exposed to unconscionable content. Many places in the world would categorically block this kind of gig simply for being damaging to the mind, and rightly so. And even in countries where this work is permissible, it would otherwise expose the company to future liability in terms of emotional trauma.
3. This 80% figure is a number fabricated from thin air. These workers don't work in call centers. They are content moderators in some shape or form -- a job that requires not just reading comprehension but being able to weigh certain current events, cultural queues, unspoken and spoken language, and other data that you can't magically feed into a machine.
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They don't work in call centers of course. But the workers who currently work in call centers, can swoop in and compete for their jobs. I can tell you that plenty of people on HN, would rather deal with moderating awful content, than to talk to endless waves of people who can't read 3 step instructions. And I would prefer either compared to say diving in sewage.
If you don't think GPT-4 can replace offshore call centers very rapidly, then you need to talk to those companies that do employ them. Onshore call centers handle more complex stuff that is harder to outsource, offshore ones not so much.
But I have to imagine that the workers’ own assessment of their leverage is more accurate than someone on the other side of the world who read an article headline. And it would appear that at least some of them, based on that assessment have decided to give unionizing a shot.
Like anything, there's a lot more beneath the surface. Many white collar folx tend to entirely write off Africa and other third world countries and misunderstand some of the dynamics there.
Yes, of course there will be a decrease in demand, that does not make unionization bad.
You also seem to underestimate the ability for African people to band together into collective movements. Yes there will be scabs, of course, but this is a step forward in the fight.
I do find myself feeling frustrated when someone approaches the comment section on a journey that has taken technical workers _several years_ through the courts system and then offers a dismissal that seems to suggest that the problem could be solved if they thought of it differently or didn't realize how shortsighted they were.
I do hope Africa is able to follow through on its ambitions to have serious punching weight in the global sphere, all problems aside. It is a beautiful continent with many beautiful cultures in it. It certainly feels a bit like a kind of home for me.
It also true, those 'collective movements' don't necessarily result in good outcomes. Look at Kenya on the map. To the east is Somalia, to the north is Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, all countries locked in civil war between different 'collective movements'.
The big opportunity for Africa in the AI era, is to use AIs to serve local healthcare/education/software development needs. There weren't many teachers/doctors/SE engineers etc to begin with, so they have little to lose from mass deploying AI.
I'm not sure unionising to get higher wages from moderation work will make a big impact. I am really curious to see the counterargument here, why will unionisation work in this case?
Of course there is the rampant corruption. There are also collective community policing strategies too in some communities, for example.
In the African Union I have high hopes for the continent, but still I think there is a a very large, very large, very large barrier to overcome because of the infighting.
As far as the unionization, I think if handled right it can have lower downsides for the amount of bargaining power that it provides. It seems that a lot of African culture thrives on ad-hoc person-to-person movements, so this feels very much within the lines of what could work in Africa. But tribalism inside of each country and between countries could still keep any local movements from having a larger impact within the continent even if, say, a local union is successful.
In any case, it basically moves the Nash Equilibrium but doesn't necessarily abolish it. If handled poorly, or if the company retaliates, then sure, if the company is willing to run the press gauntlet and such. But at the very least, I have hopes.
Also I know of the conflict in Somalia, Ethiopia, South & North Sudan, etc. I haven't checked in on Kenya in a while. I hope all is well over there, it is generally a very beautiful and safe country with a few notable exceptions. Has something happened, or is it in the list mainly due to proximity to the conflict (or something like that?) :'( </3
That being said, "Africans from Kenya, for example, that I've talked to, generally blame British imperialism for many of the problems today" is a typical and unimpressive mentality. Tribal conflicts existed way before the British did.
For example, Sudan existed before the British came, and the Arab vs black fights in Sudan is not a British creation. Somalia is mono-ethnic, doesn't stop it from endless wars. Ethiopia was not colonised beyond a short Italian occupation, their current civil war is still the result of ethnic conflicts.
African unity is also a questionable concept. West, Central, East and Southern Africa are four different continents in terms of culture, ethnicities, climate, and size. The only consensus is 'no-changing-borders-by-force', yes, they know that those colonial imposed borders is the only thing keeping africa from falling into a bloodbath free-for-all.
That's why AI is really africa's greatest hope. They have not invested much into white collar knowledge and industries, and AI allows them to leapfrog much of it. It'll be very interesting to see how the african public reacts to AI.
On A100s this particular CIFAR10 network trains in under 7 seconds for example and the network (fp16) is <10 MB IIRC, the relative gains over other previous training speeds is even better on older cards IIRC due to it being pretty memory limited at this point. It could be used as a backbone in other networks and is nice because it is good to run experiments on and also can directly deploy at scale pretty easily. In my experience, cycle time is actually one of the biggest resources for most smaller research initiatives.
I just haven't had the opportunity to talk to anyone yet to see if there's a way that I could interface with the African AI community over it. I don't know how Colab works but they work pretty darn well in the free version of Colab, and both are annotated to help a moderately well-motivated learner pick up some of the ropes themselves.
It seems like you know a little about the space. If you do know anyone or have any pointers as to where I could/should look to talk to people about this, please do let me know! I think OSS can do a lot and would love to give a bit to the community, for sure.
There will be a large interest in selling AI to Africans, GPT-4 today, lightly modified, can already radically improve African education. The vastly underpaid and overworked teachers no longer need to waste time in preparing lessons, they just need to control the classroom and perform assessments. Also GPT-4 probably dominates your average English tutor in Africa...
The problem is the cost, a GPT-4 subscription is far beyond the means of an average African. The bottleneck is with server-side inference costs, once that is solved, I expect a AI gold rush in Africa, where western companies compete to sell AI subscription services. Your average African already owns a cheap andrioid phone with 3g connection, which is good enough for an AI chatbot.
Even my limited knowledge of the situation is enough to tell that this is neither historically accurate nor a fair portrayal.
This does not sound like a good faith argument.
No collective movements means no American revolution, no Civil war, no French Revolution, no Glorious revolution in Britain.
We'd still bow down to Kings and have slavery
I am dreading that day. Most often when calling a business I need someone to fix something and often it can only be fixed by someone that can make a decision that is kind of "outside of the rules". AI will be trained to always stick to the rules, so I foresee an even more frustrating call center future.