Yeah, but think of the shareholders!
They’ll be so happy when they see line go up 📈
Someone has to think of the shareholders!
… It’s not me, but someone definitely does think about them.
workers in long-exploited countries like Kenya, Colombia, and India are becoming increasingly outraged over the miserable labor of AI training
So…don’t do it?
I like this content because it easily demonstrates the cognitive dissonance when speaking about how people live in other countries.
Those folks are only a little better off than literal slaves. Many don’t have a choice of occupation. They just do whatever they can get paid for.
Are you going to pay them a living wage so they can afford to do that?
No. No one is going to pay them a living wage. Doesn’t mean they can’t work somewhere else.
some people don’t have other options if they wanna feed their families. blame the execs, not the workers
Of course… they accept terrible working conditions because they like spanky daddy
This comment is so insane, especially after reading the conversation that resulted from it.
You acknowledge that the workers work because they need the money, you acknowledge that the alternative is a worse or no job. You call it a societal issue.
And your comment is “so… don’t do it?”… yeah, don’t do checks notes societal issue, don’t complain about being forced into checks notes again societal issue.
This comment is so insane. It’s like you read my entire comment but didn’t comprehend any of it.
This comment is so insane. It’s like you read my entire comment but didn’t comprehend any of it.
You don’t have the monopoly on that, even if that were a true assessment.
…monopoly? What are you even talking about? Do you even know what that word means?
Then what did I miss? Are you not telling individuals to not complain about a societal issue when they can just not do it and suffer more?
No one is complaining about a societal issues, they’re complaining about AI companies.
Yes because they could create better working conditions of their workers. They could be the first step to fix societal issues. And I don’t see where it is written that the workers are not aware and not complaining about the societal issue. Because they can do both at once.
they could create better working conditions of their workers
As could a thousand other people.
I don’t see where it is written that the workers are not aware and not complaining
Do you see their workers in this thread?
Other people could create it, yeah. The workers of ai companies are the ones complaining though. Other workers would have the same great reason to complain. But the workers of ai companies blame the ai companies who are directly responsible for their situation.
No? Why would I see workers in this thread? How would that change anything about the reality of their working conditions or the ability of ai companies to improve them?
They do these jobs for the same reason textile manufacturing is located in similar countries; it is a shit job but it competes with the alternatives.
Exactly
If you wish to understand why people in these countries feel compelled to undertake this mentally damaging a d unsafe work then you should read up on the first industrial revolution and why people who were originally farm hands and hand spinners in the North of England felt compelled to move into the cities to take on the physically damaging and unsafe work on the cotton machines.
One observer at the time, Dr Andrew Ure, said this:
“In my recent tour, through the manufacturing districts, I have seen tens of thousands of old, young and middle-aged of both sexes, many of them too feeble to get their daily bread by any of the former modes of industry, earning abundant food, raiment, and domestic accommodation, without perspiring at a single pore, screened meanwhile from the summer’s sun and the winter’s frost, in apartments more airy and salubrious than those of the metropolis in which our legislative and fashionable aristocracies assemble. In those spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials, and assigns to each the regulated task, substituting for painful muscular effort on their part, the energies of his own gigantic arm, and demanding in return only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations as casually occur in his workmanship.”
From his perspective, for many the suffering was worth the wage. But others at the time were more, as they put it, horrified by what they saw such as Dr. John Kay:
“Whilst the engine runs the people must work - men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine - breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness.”
This is why history is a vital part of education because by god am I seeing so much modern shit rhyming with a victorian tune!
My source for the quotes: The Peterloo Massacre - Robert Reid.
If you wish to understand why people in these countries feel compelled to undertake this mentally damaging a d unsafe work
I do know. It’s the same reason anyone takes a job; money.
Ok so how do you square that with your original comment of “so… don’t do it”?
Isn’t reducing a nuanced situation down to “money” going to lose sight of a lot of factors?
If any job was just about money then why, for example, do people choose to remain in teaching when they know they’re being poorly paid, overworked, and undervalued in society when they could leave and get more money in a less stressful job?
Context is king and if you want to understand more deeply why people are willing to work jobs because of or lack of financial incentives you need to also understand the wider context such as the time period it’s taking place in, the economic state of the region, the social constructs of the society, the technology being used, or any other lens you could look at it through.
Looking at the past, present, and possible futures get far more interesting when you do that.
The why is not important. The point is if there were better opportunities, they would take them. If this job didn’t exist they would either be at a worse job, or no job.
And the bigger point is that this is not an AI problem, this is a societal problem.
So within the same comment you go from
The why is not important
To then say
And the bigger point is that this is not an AI problem, this is societal problem.
You clearly present the hypothesis that the the “why” is because these happen to be the best paid jobs and therefore people take them which is a societal problem.
Please can you explain why the “why” isn’t important and you then go onto give the “why” as “societal problem”?
Perhaps it might be useful to ask “why are these the better paid jobs in these regions?” because that adds additional context which might, as you indicate the need for, start pointing in the direction of solutions to this problem other than just broadly gesturing to everything going “society”.
Indian politicians like their people doing shit work for too little pay from foreign companies, it keeps them distracted from the corruption.
Like apparently 10-20% of their GDP is from the exploitative “legit” call centers and these kind of training or moderation gigs, and a significant amount of that chunk also comes from the scammer industry that they allow to operate for the economic benefits.
Whilst the first paragraph I can agree with, the chunk of 10-20% GDP is unsubstantiated with data. As it stands today, the core of scam industry has actually moved away from India towards the porous Myanmar-Cambodia border. Not only is it not well defined due to political reasons, the instability provides a volatile situation. Private mafia like companies operate there.
Sure, Indian folks do work there as well but not out of their own volition. Many have been gotten there through fake promises of high paying jobs only to be let down and with no way to escape. This isn’t a phenomenon restricted to India either. Recently, South Korea summoned the Cambodian Ambassador after its citizens were embezzeled in a similar way in the compounds there.
Yeah, capitalism is cringe and encourages governments to turn their citizens into slaves for corporations.
paying data labelers roughly one US cent for every task they finish, which can take hours. It’s a system Kanyugi compared to “modern slavery.
The article kinda ignores the fact that despite the horrible pay and work, it must be a much better job for these people than anything else they can get in their country because they continue to subject themselves to it. How bad are things when 1 or 2 pennies a day is the best that’s available? I don’t understand how you could live on < $1 a month in any country no matter how poor.
Yeah, math doesn’t add up here. Literally any other activity would pay more or be of more benefit. Begging would drag in far more than that.
You know I’ve put myself through some genuinely awful jobs because I foolishly believed that the job in question had some feature I just couldn’t get anywhere else. Either it paid slightly better, my friends worked there, or it was inside at a desk and didn’t have weekends.
Every time I’d end up getting fired from one of those jobs, though I think I survived at one or two long enough to quit, I’d end up finding a new awful job that was actually slightly better. And the cycle would begin anew. And I wasn’t the only one, most of the people working those jobs could tell you a similar story.
My point is, if you can convince people that it’s worse anywhere else, they’ll put up with quite a bit. More to that point, my current job has occasional weekends, is not climate controlled, and my desk is really just for taking breaks at, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. Because the things that make a job good are not the things that most people associate with good jobs. Which makes it easier to manipulate them in to keeping really bad ones.
Yeah you make really good points.
This is the classic argument used to justify exploiting people in developing nations. In reality the incentive is to keep them living in poverty, so they can keep paying a pittance. Businesses will go to extreme lengths to maintain these conditions.
I’m not saying it’s ok, I’m in no way in support of it. You guys are reading me wrong.
I’m saying I genuinely don’t understand the math here.
…there are more people than there are jobs… no job = no money
all land is accounted for too, no place left to “strike out on your own”
so, if there are no jobs and you have no land/property…you have only what others are willing/able to give you, same as anyone else in that same position anywhere else.
and just like everywhere else, they arent cared for not because they can’t afford to, but because keeping miserable homeless people around is a nice reminder of just how much worse you could have it…so don’t test your luck.
