The high human price of low-cost labor.

Cambridge Forum continues its investigation into the impact of AI: Servant or Master? with FEEDING THE MACHINE on Thursday, December 19. The proliferation of A.I. offers seemingly limitless implications for the future, however what is less known about, is the hidden human cost of the labor that feeds this machine—and it is horrific.   

Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity.  But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions, laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible.  

Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centers in Kenya and Uganda and the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to very disturbing material is the norm. The daily demands of the job are inhuman, content moderators for companies like Meta are expected to watch hours of suicides, rapes and torture  -“almost every day… you normalize things that are just not normal.”  

Researchers Muldoon, Graham and Cant conducted hundreds of interviews during countless hours of fieldwork collected over more than a decade. Their book describes the lives of the workers who are deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. The examples move from California, to Iceland, to Kenya, to Mexico and beyond, featuring stories from different composite characters. The data annotator in northern Uganda clicking through endless footage for $1.16 an hour; to the artist whose voice has been sold online; to the engineer pressured to deliver an imperfect final product, without ethical guidelines.  The book provides an important and overlooked examination of the network that maintains an exploitative system, revealing the untold truth about the excessively high human cost of creating A.I.

Speakers

James Muldoon

The authors of Feeding the Machine, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant, are based at Oxford University at the Oxford Internet Institute. They describe A.I. as “an extraction machine that feeds off humanity’s collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms.”  They wanted “to give voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized & colonial exploitation.” Muldoon, our guest speaker, is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Essex.

Dr. James Muldoon is  an Associate Professor in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Head of Digital Research at the Autonomy think tank.

His research examines how modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital platforms can create public value and serve the common good. It explores how notions of freedom, power and democracy need to be rethought in a digital age and what we can do to harness the positive potential of new technology.