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.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 reasonably criticize that system, and many have, but it is not colonialism, except in the sense that colonialism is now used as a broad term for anything that feels exploitative.
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.
This was Wikipedia's tl; dr of "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
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.
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 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 force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain, 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 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, which can be seen as a foreign imposed colonial power in a way, since no modern country can trade and operate without 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
People have been saying this for ages in the West, but when I was in India in the early 2000s the way I got my first domain name was by doing some kind of nonsense online job for $100 paid into a completely non-KYC'd account on Paypal or something. Western jobs pay a lot compared to what I could get there as someone totally unskilled. And I was completely aware that if the price rose to that of a Western worker they'd prefer to get the latter because there's some discount for the uncertainty of working with a foreign worker (market for lemons etc.).
Personally, I much preferred having that gig rather than not having the gig. Got a lot of stuff from it. Computer hardware, domain name, etc. arjie.com is mine actually from there. I get why people go to the West and do grievance studies. It's what sells in that market and just like I was selling content generation or some rudimentary web software which it's hard to argue is all that high-value, they're selling grievance studies because that's where their skill meets the market price.
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.
Edit: And neither our company (a very active, profitable company that sells data to almost all major AI players) nor none of our relevant competition is on this map for some reason. Mercor, Scale, Surge, and Snorkel would be the top players I'd expect to see here. This map has none of them?
It does have Cognizant, which is a international body shop / cheap consultancy that's been around long before LLMs, and mostly builds cheap software fast for existing companies. It also has NextWealth, a company with approximately 1% of the revenue of even the smallest stateside RL Env and labelling players. I'm not sure this map displays literally any meaningful data about the "global labor powering AI"?
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.
See my comment elsewhere this comment section, but, it's not "labor arbitage": it's an imperial system of capitalist power that's enforced via violence. Further, this was understood by China and Deng and the opening up to western markets with a defanged internal capitalist system was a planned move to eventually libereate themselves from westen hegimony; the term used for this was "hide your strength, bide your time."
The negative effects of AI interacting with our society can be understood as almost entirely a function of capitalism. Look up "the real subsumption of labor." These effects on the environment are a direct result of fundamentatl flaws in the capitalist system to regulate externalities.
I guarantee AI run by a totalitarian "socialist" government would be far less humane than AI in a capitalist federalist republic.
>imperial system of capitalist power that's enforced via violence
All states have a monopoly on violence over their citizens. Paying people for their labor at a negotiated price in a free market is the great humanitarian invention capitalism offered the world, where before the status quo was domination and slavery.
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
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".
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.
But it was also stated that their labor is extracted, which sounds like slavery, and that they are exploited, which sounds like fraud, and that they take some psychic damage, which sounds like a JRPG. Those would all be bad things.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
The point at hand is concerning the use of the word "colonialism" in reference to issues of this nature, not providing you with a reference sheet for your convenience. There are plenty of books and articles available to satisfy your desire for citations[0], though honestly I think any degree of awareness around historic patterns of the interactions between (primarily) Western Europe (and the US) and the Global South would suggest that such assertions are at the very least plausibly credible.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
> 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.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
Wrong framing. I'm saying that any trade between a colonizer nation and a colonized nation is undeniably made different by the lasting effects of colonialism. There are mitigations for this that many academics have advocated for, but they all require the developed world to cede money and power to the undeveloped one, which historically hasn't been a great pitch. But until it's done, you can't divorce these things from one another and no international trade can be truly, squeaky clean.
It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage. That's not a moral statement about your particular employer, that's just a rational actor model of economics. In turn it's in your interest to expand least labor for the greatest pay. The asymmetry is your employer is an institution that can put incalculable resources into imposing its utility on you, from union busting and productivity spyware to lobbying national policy and conspiring to tilt the labor market... An employer can go months without significant fractions of employees, they can hire an entire hidden backup department in case of a strike, but you'll probably quickly starve without ongoing employment.
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.
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.
Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?
Do you trust the Soviets GDP numbers? Even if you do, the Soviets were spending upwards of 40% of their GDP on the military, not exactly a quality of life enhancement. Even discounting that, the only states that I could find that might qualify are Moldova (about the same level) and Ukraine about 72%). Ukraine is pretty clearly the Russians are to blame there. Other post Soviet countries, like Turkmenistan are > 580% bigger real GDP.
Uzbekistan, Armenia and Kazakhstan are around 3x bigger GDP.
Belarus, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan are around 2x bigger GDP.
Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Georgia are about 1.3x bigger GDP.
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.
You said "living standards have plummeted since the collapse of communism in many countries" objectively not true. After communism collapsed (collapsing because it failed as an economic model) life in those countries was pretty bad. Living in the ruins of a failed system is going to be a bad time. Even so, of the 12 Soviet states, 10 are much better off. Turkmenistan is 582% bigger GDP. Moldova is about the same Ukraine is worse off, but being invaded by Russia will do that. Other states like Poland at 3.5x the GDP and Estonia are at 8x the GDP.
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.
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.
>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.
And just how many deaths do capitalists and capitalist policies inflict? We never see *those* numbers.
This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.
But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.
And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.
We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.
Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.
In order to really do the math here, you'd have to determine whether such drugs are as likely to be created under non-capitalist regimes. In other words, even if capitalism has less-than-ideal mechanisms for distributing lifesaving drugs widely (during their patent period at least), maybe it is better at creating lifesaving drugs in the first place. It's possible that the net result of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry is millions of lives saved. Without taking that account, you can't do a real cost-benefit analysis.
Of course, it's probably not really possible to do such a comparison, because there are so many other factors, and state intervention is everywhere even in capitalist countries, via publicly funded research.
I think the only really fair way to compare which system causes more deaths than the other is to look at overall health outcomes and lifespans.
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"
All fun and games until it’s the value of your labor that AI is impacting. What terms will you come up with that signals to your peers that you’re part of the in-group? Probably something very masculine and edgy to show that you should be taken very seriously, but in a very cool way. Maybe something like “knowledge economy arbitrage”.
It’s worth talking about. There is probably a very fine line between standard outsourcing and some form of colonialism. To me Chinese companies building ports in African countries where they bring in their own workers and then set up situations where the home country defaults and the port defaults to China is definitely some form of colonialism.
I'm a person who believes an activist has already decided the conclusion and just finds whatever facts they need to fit their narrative. They also use BS terms like AI colonialism and other nonsensical meaningless words to manipulate people emotionally.
So yes I think this is claptrap of the first order that exists so people can pretend it's of any value to reaffirm their echo chamber.
That seems like an ad hominem attack to me, as you haven't really addressed conclusion the research points to: Why are all of the worst jobs in the industry predominantly exported to the global south?
I think it's easy to conclude that the companies can more easily exploit workers in these locations, which points to colonialism and capitalist incentives. Instead of dismissing someone's research because of guilt by association, perhaps you can explain why this is not an exploitative practice?
"Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people." -- And you see nothing about that seems like it could possibly be a way to describe the current AI landscape? Perhaps you jumping ship because you see a buzzword, or something you have decided is a buzzword is just you being mentally lazy?
I think the problem many people have with the word colonialism, besides the incredible amount of overuse and misuse, is that by the definition you provided you can label almost any international interaction as colonialism if there is even a slight imbalance by loosening the meaning of "domination". There are certainly countries that have dominated others e.g. China and Tibet but the vast majority have much more complex relationships. Take the US and Mexico, does the US dominate Mexico? They have a great deal of influence in Mexico but that doesn't seem to prevent the Mexican government or its people from acting in ways opposed to the US. They still have to negotiate treaties and enforce them imperfectly. For a strict definition of domination, this isn't it.
It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.
So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.
No because I'm not captured ideologically. You can run open source models (which are ever improving) and there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black.
Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.
Who can run open source models? Everyone in the world, or only a small subset of the population with access to computing products that are powerful enough to run models? Who builds those computing products? Where do their raw materials come from? Where are they mined and processed? Who manufactures and assembles the parts?
> (which are ever improving)
How are they being improved? Are moderation and data labeling jobs usually done by the same people who consume the outputs of the models, or are they outsourced for paltry wages?
> there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware
No moat for whom? Can the data labelers above start their own AI hardware company?
> Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black
So we should settle for inaction?
> By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism
Where does the lithium for electric car batteries come from? What about other rare minerals?
> Bangladesh apparel colonialism
Aren't the people in sweatshops the exploited ones? And the ones who consume the products of their labor the colonialists?
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.
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.
We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. It's seen as uniquely cruel because it corrupts intangible things like 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 inhumane 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.
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.
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.
I don't see how your reply connects with what the parent said. But to your point, I don't think anyone in this conversation specifically claimed anything about workers of the third world needing to be prevented from taking these jobs, but rather how they're universally harmful to the human mind.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
Not really - studies have linked these jobs to severe phycological distress. They aren't "good jobs" in the sense that "software developer" is a good job. They're actively harmful to the person's mental well-being.
>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.
How is it patronizing to say "You've never worked this job and clearly have no idea if it truly is good or not"?
If anything it's patronizing to say that staring at disturbing content all day is preferable to agricultural jobs, you know, the jobs people have been working and enjoying for literally tens of thousands of years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about they just don't treat their workers in the Global South as lesser than ones in rich countries, for starters?
> objectively improving conditions there
Which conditions specifically? The very act of picking conditions and what constitutes an improvement introduces subjectivity already.
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.
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.
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.
Looking at the general definition of colonialism... .. .
Whether it's colonialism, economic arbritrage.. if this is so bad, happy to learn other options.
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.
This was Wikipedia's tl; dr of "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
Here's more if that sounded elucidating: 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.
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.
Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain, 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 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, which can be seen as a foreign imposed colonial power in a way, since no modern country can trade and operate without 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
It's preemptive union busting.
Personally, I much preferred having that gig rather than not having the gig. Got a lot of stuff from it. Computer hardware, domain name, etc. arjie.com is mine actually from there. I get why people go to the West and do grievance studies. It's what sells in that market and just like I was selling content generation or some rudimentary web software which it's hard to argue is all that high-value, they're selling grievance studies because that's where their skill meets the market price.
I just wish it didn't, haha!
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
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.
Edit: And neither our company (a very active, profitable company that sells data to almost all major AI players) nor none of our relevant competition is on this map for some reason. Mercor, Scale, Surge, and Snorkel would be the top players I'd expect to see here. This map has none of them?
It does have Cognizant, which is a international body shop / cheap consultancy that's been around long before LLMs, and mostly builds cheap software fast for existing companies. It also has NextWealth, a company with approximately 1% of the revenue of even the smallest stateside RL Env and labelling players. I'm not sure this map displays literally any meaningful data about the "global labor powering AI"?
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.
The negative effects of AI interacting with our society can be understood as almost entirely a function of capitalism. Look up "the real subsumption of labor." These effects on the environment are a direct result of fundamentatl flaws in the capitalist system to regulate externalities.
>imperial system of capitalist power that's enforced via violence
All states have a monopoly on violence over their citizens. Paying people for their labor at a negotiated price in a free market is the great humanitarian invention capitalism offered the world, where before the status quo was domination and slavery.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect from an Ivy League senior in 2026.
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?
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.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition.
I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.
But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.
And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.
We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.
Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.
Of course, it's probably not really possible to do such a comparison, because there are so many other factors, and state intervention is everywhere even in capitalist countries, via publicly funded research.
I think the only really fair way to compare which system causes more deaths than the other is to look at overall health outcomes and lifespans.
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"
Call it "colonialism" if you want but it screams "fake moralism"
So yes I think this is claptrap of the first order that exists so people can pretend it's of any value to reaffirm their echo chamber.
I think it's easy to conclude that the companies can more easily exploit workers in these locations, which points to colonialism and capitalist incentives. Instead of dismissing someone's research because of guilt by association, perhaps you can explain why this is not an exploitative practice?
It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.
So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.
Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.
Who can run open source models? Everyone in the world, or only a small subset of the population with access to computing products that are powerful enough to run models? Who builds those computing products? Where do their raw materials come from? Where are they mined and processed? Who manufactures and assembles the parts?
> (which are ever improving)
How are they being improved? Are moderation and data labeling jobs usually done by the same people who consume the outputs of the models, or are they outsourced for paltry wages?
> there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware
No moat for whom? Can the data labelers above start their own AI hardware company?
> Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black
So we should settle for inaction?
> By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism
Where does the lithium for electric car batteries come from? What about other rare minerals?
> Bangladesh apparel colonialism
Aren't the people in sweatshops the exploited ones? And the ones who consume the products of their labor the colonialists?
The most complete capture is the one so internalized it doesn't even register as ideology anymore.
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.
> 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.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane 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.
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.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
[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.
If anything it's patronizing to say that staring at disturbing content all day is preferable to agricultural jobs, you know, the jobs people have been working and enjoying for literally tens of thousands of years.
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.