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The exploited labor behind artificial intelligence (2022)

171 points by zhte415 4y ago

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dekhn 4y ago
the "guilt-industrial complex"
- deleted 4y ago
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- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  They'd rather see poor people earn no money than see them earn anything below what their own preconceptions have labelled a fair wage. It seems that for a lot of people, it's not about building things, it's about tearing things down. The psychology appears akin to the childhood bully who, unable to build their own, goes around kicking over other children's sandcastles, then feels smugly content with their "accomplishment"... not recognising all they've done is ruin others work without contributing anything of value to the world.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    OK, so then we should repeal labor laws and allow employers to abuse their employees? The problem is that your tired analogy has no nuance: all criticism is considered "bullying". We should simply allow everyone to do anything they want? Clearly that's absurd, so the sandcastle analogy doesn't work. Why not just argue the criticism on its merits, rather than complaining that criticism shouldn't be allowed at all?
    - ripe 4y ago
      I don't know why you're being downvoted. Your point is valid. Many arguments can be made against the article's critique, but the analogy used by the comment above yours is rejecting the very idea that these companies can be criticized at all.
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      So all off shoring is labor abuse? TIL
      - phailhaus 4y ago
        I'm saying there's a conversation to be had about off-shoring labor, but the parent comment basically said "no, all criticism is bullying, and bullying is wrong."
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    They call it "critical theory" instead of "constructive theory" for a reason. It takes no skill to critique.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    I think your "building" and "tearing down" analogy is actually spot on. We have a whole group of people who are so concerned with what's already built and building more and more onto it, that any attempt to point out where they went wrong in the foundation is met with criticisms like "all you people want to do is tear things down" and "well if your foundation is so good then why haven't you built as much as us". Look at the whole phenomenon of critical theories, especially critical race theory. People were so enraged by the prospect of having the foundations questioned that the actual criticisms were less important.
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guywithahat 4y ago
Sometimes I wonder if these "ethical" articles are only put up to stop new companies from competing. Like "ok now that OpenAI Inc has a basic AI, lets be sure to close the door behind us so we don't have to deal with competing startups"
- hnbad 4y ago
  By that logic any revelations about bad labor conditions underlying first world products or services only serve to prevent competition from also exploiting those conditions. If your ethical conundrum is between continuing to allow the exploitation of the post-colonial third world, and to stifle competition in first world markets, I think you need to retake an ethics class because that is not a conundrum.
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  Would be less need for these articles if major tech companies would stop acting like villains in a sci-fi movie.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Wouldn't see them "acting like villains in a sci-fi movie" if there weren't systematic economic incentives for them to act this way.
    - roughly 4y ago
      And yet, every one of these organizations consists of individuals making sets of individual decisions on an ongoing basis, who indeed face incentives as well* but also persist in making the dubious ethical decisions that the company enacts, and we can in fact judge them for this, because companies are made of people who don’t actually abdicate moral responsibility for their actions by logging into a corporate email system. *And here’s where I digress to say, again, that, indeed if you are the single mother of a child with a heart condition wholly reliant on the expensive company health care not lapsing for even a minute lest your child not just die but literally explode, taking your whole family and half the neighborhood with them, I’m not judging you. If, on the other hand, you’re a single dude between 20 and 35 with a college degree, significant assets, no debt, and a sellable skillset, yes, you’re the one I’m judging.
subradios 4y ago
The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories. We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s. http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_history_everyone_but_an_idiot_knows_that_the_lower_classes_must_be_kept_poor_or_they_will_never_be_industrious/ http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_histor...
  - tristor 4y ago
    That link is unhinged. It considers people to be self-sufficient on mere subsistence. A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration and away from violent domination, creating wealth and value in excess of subsistence, and opening up the massive quality of life increase to all, is a significant departure in a positive direction from mere subsistence for an agrarian peasant that survives at the whim of people who could brutally and violently take from them. That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      I don't think you're reading the article as-written. It'd be nice to see some sources for the quoted pamphlets, but if we assume that they are actual quotes from primary source material, it's quite telling. The article does get a lot wrong, e.g. conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism (hunting was been controlled by central political authorities for centuries before the industrial revolution). But there's also a good point being made, that breaking up communal economic systems can be used as a tool of subjugation and control. There's nothing in here about self-sufficiency or subsistence per se.
AlbertCory 4y ago
> But around 15 years ago, before the proliferation of gig work, deep learning systems were considered merely an academic curiosity, confined to a few interested researchers. Um, no. Google was using machine learning more than 15 years ago, notably in the SmartASS system that predicts whether someone will click on an ad [1]. I got my cousin Missy a gig (at $15 an hour) rating ads and search results. This story is hardly a claim of humane treatment of gig workers, I should note. I intervened and got her treated fairly. > Companies make sure to hire people from poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as contractors rather than as full time employees. Citations, please. A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population. If you want to design something that appeals to Americans, you want American raters. Since the US is by far the largest consumer of Internet services, it stands to reason most raters of "quality" will need to be from the US. If you just want to know if an image contains objectionable content, then yes, you could use Third World employees. [1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
- zhte415 4y ago
  > A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population. An excellent point.
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- tristor 4y ago
  These “journalists” see someone training image classifiers using Mechanical Turk, which awards a wage in excess of the local economy in the third world, and imagine to themselves this is how all models get trained because they don’t understand ML, they don’t understand market segmentation, and generally don’t understand technology or business.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
jsimzeroone 4y ago
Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" has a fake AI "character" -- a book that appears to be AI but is really operated by low-paid humans in 3rd world countries (reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk, a supposed chess playing automaton that actually contained a small person). There's an old observation from Arthur C. Clarke, that sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. One thing that learning how magic tricks are performed taught me is that magicians typically do their fake magic by doing an unreasonable amount of work behind the scenes -- "magic" in the real world is often just doing a large amount of work that people don't realize is happening. Given all that it seems appropriate that the new "real world magic" -- ML systems imitating intelligence -- really rest on a lot of hidden work by human beings. Just like magical devices like iPhones exist due to a lot of surprisingly cheap labor. Imagining otherwise is like imagining that the delicious food from a 3-star kitchen just appears from the chef's mind, without the help of all of the low-paid kitchen workers, farm workers, etc. that in reality do most of the work.
- sfritz 4y ago
  In Diamond Age the book is being performed by a skilled actor who is voicing many characters using a script entirely generated by the AI.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > a book that appears to be AI but is really operated by low-paid humans in 3rd world countries I've seen this in real life before, no need for a work of fiction.
  - brudgers 4y ago
    Diamond Age was first published in 1995. I don’t think I am out on an intellectual limb believing very very few people would have seen an AI written book back then.
- andrepd 4y ago
  >reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk, a supposed chess playing automaton that actually contained a small person Reminiscent of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a current real-life example of exactly they.
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oh_sigh 4y ago
Let's say this job was not available for $1.46 an hour after tax. Are those potential employees better off or worse off?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  lets say profits were making their way down the chain - would the economy be better off or worse off?
  - oh_sigh 4y ago
    Probably better. See? I answered your question. Not sure why it is so hard to answer mine.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      because yours is a manipulative false dichotomy as demonstrated by the second question.
      - hackinthebochs 4y ago
        Stated more realistically, what will those people do in the mean time while we all wait for the economic structure of the world to reorient itself towards profit sharing? How long are they expected to wait?
        guerrilla 4y ago
        The economic structure doesn't need to change for these companies to act as if it had, nor for these people to take these jobs if neither thing happens. All three things can be true at the same time. As I said, it was a false dichotomy. That's key to understanding the situation.
        hackinthebochs 4y ago
        And how do you expect to effect such a change? Is it just a matter of generating sufficient outrage in your mind? Why should these people be forced to wait and suffer while you and your ilk write think pieces about silicon valley? This is the problem with ideas like yours, there is no practical plan on offer to create the reality you are advocating for. Yet, you expect these people who are suffering right now to just sit tight. Its narcissism.
prvc 4y ago
>The public’s understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture First clause of first sentence falsely posits that the "public" has a single mind, and claims the authors know the contents of this mind and what causes it to acquire these contents. It also adopts a false pose of authority and and understanding superior to that of the (nonexistent) mind of the public. It was nice of the authors to disqualify themselves from offering worthy ideas on the topic of AI so early in the article.
- bostonwalker 4y ago
  Do you really believe that we cannot make generalizations about the layperson's understanding of AI? Unless you have a related degree in math, statistics, engineering, or comp. sci, i.e. a tiny minority of people, it's probably true that you get your understanding from pop culture.
  - prvc 4y ago
    >Do you really believe that we cannot make generalizations about the layperson's understanding of AI? I never said anything like that. Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing.
    - bostonwalker 4y ago
      > First clause of first sentence falsely posits that the "public" has a single mind Seems hard to say this on one hand and allow for useful generalizations on the other. > Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing Off the bailey and into your motte
      - prvc 4y ago
        >Off the bailey and into your motte That's another misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my words, which were just making a separate point (could have been a top-level comment).
VLM 4y ago
Its a supply and demand problem. The supply of human AI gig workers vastly staggeringly exceeds the demand for human AI workers. Trash talking the entire industry just means the poor will get poorer and be worse treated when the demand dries up even more. So I'm not really clear on the social justice angle of the article. This does bring up an important long term market point. If there are an essentially infinite number of people willing to drive a car for practically nothing, tell me again why do we need self driving cars as an example of AI? Its not like we're running out of poor people anytime soon, they don't cost much of anything, so why waste all that money on kicking the poor people out of the economy? Eventually, once everyone's kicked out of the economy, there won't be anyone left to buy the very expensive self driving cars anyway, and no one will need self driving cars because they'll be nowhere economically viable left to drive to. Certainly we can "self reproduce" car drivers much cheaper than we can produce self driving cars full of unobtainable microprocessors, and producing human drivers is much more "black swan" proof than producing globalist microprocessors. The other problem is a economy, in the long run, has to serve its participants. Lets say as a thought experiment its inevitable that all capital and all economic activity will solely be concentrated in those with IQs over 150 or sociopathic tendencies or outright criminality, and of course with everyone else kicked out of the economy they will be the sole beneficiaries of AI, much like the European Royalty was, in some sense, the the only beneficiary of gold mining industry. Well... won't 99% of the population go all French Revolution on them and fire up the guillotines? As soon as those people at the top of the pyramid are removed, and there won't be too many of them, the 99% of the population can go back to happy productivity. Any individual who rebels during the runup will get steamrolled by the rest of their competitors who don't rebel from the plan, but the endpoint of the plan is anyone cooperating with the plan to the inevitable endpoint will get the guillotine in the end, so what's the maximally efficient game theory perspective if you're trapped in a self destructive game where either total participation or obvious non-participation results in your demise? Well, everyone's better off if everyone "phones it in" and fails. So I expect a lot of "totally unexpected" AI failures. Another philosophical problem is we've run a repeated massively parallel experiment on producing smarter better educated "non-artificial" intelligence entities known as the university system, etc. It really hasn't worked out other than the usual primate dominance ritual purposes and making certain the people at the top stay at the top. But people seem to think if we emulate that nonsense that never worked in a computer, it'll work next time. Sort of like perpetual motion doesn't work IRL out in the real world but if you abuse a CAD/CAM program hard enough a simulation of perpetual motion will work in a computer ... but even if we fake it in a computer simulation, that STILL doesn't mean it'll work IRL. Its almost like a "heisenberg uncertainty principle" of AI where if we had AI it seems the universe routes around it such that it can't make a net profit. Kind of like burning two barrels of crude oil to grow one barrel of ethanol to replace a barrel of crude oil, graph that out and see where it leads? I'm just saying, if "low IQ" biologicals are already economically excluded, why would "low IQ" AIs not also be economically excluded? And we've proven we can't educate "better" biologicals, so trying to produce a master race of AIs is likely to fail just as badly as those past experiments.
scotty79 4y ago
> “So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions.” You can say this exact thing about capitalism as a whole. Children working in coltan mines and on cocoa plantations and such. It feels a bit superficial to write articles that just jump on some cool tech bandwagon just to point out that this tech is also exploitative. Because nearly everything is. And in case of that specific tech it's probably not that bad when compared to children in coltan mines. It's a feature of our economy that we, well off people, all benefit from, our entire life. We'd have to change entire rules of engagement and who's gonna pay to make that happen? We are not going to change it by playing whack-a-mole with global behemoths.
- golemiprague 4y ago
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- Xelynega 4y ago
  Children working in coltan mines and on cocoa plantations are part of the same issue, so I don't understand why you take issue with that issue being brought to the forefront using 'some cool tech bandwagon'. It's a cool tech bandwagon because people's eyes are on it, if you agree these issues are issues wouldn't you want them seen by those eyes? I don't quite understand your final point. Yes, changing the labour relations globally would require global changes. > Who's gonna pay to make that happen? It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour. Why is it assumed that they can continue to shoulder the majority of the work for the minority of the benefits, but the idea that the work and benefits should be spread more evenly is abhorrent?
  - scotty79 4y ago
    > I don't understand why you take issue with that issue being brought to the forefront using 'some cool tech bandwagon'. It just feels cheap and even less effective than other approaches. It promotes a whack-a-mole mindset. > It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour. Ah, I see your misunderstanding. I didn't mean that somebody will bear the cost of a change. I meant that for any change to happen somebody must pay out of their ears for political influence to force that change. The only maeningful laws that come into power are laws that somebody bought. Who's gonna buy 'non-exploitation' law if everybody with any money (billionaires, but also you and me) benefits from this exploitation? Want to solve the problem? Figure a way how someone can earn big money on preventing exploitation of people.
aborsy 4y ago
I assure you, even if the technology one day is fully unsupervised, with minimal involvement from the humans, no carbon emission, etc, people will still publish the exact same articles, form unions, protest, etc: we are abused, there is inequality and exploitation, the productivity gains of technologies must be equally shared regardless of the contributions, introduce ever higher taxation, and so on. Amazon apparently pays around $25/hour to its starting warehouse workers. That’s 1k per week for 40 hours per week, or around 4k/month. That’s more than what French government pays its rocket scientists. People can discover their market rates based on their skills, and are free to work for another employer. There is no lock down.
- ceres 4y ago
  > That’s more than what French government pays its rocket scientists. I was about to call bullshit but then looked up the average salary for an aeronautical engineer in France and it was… bleak.
- c-cube 4y ago
  French rocket scientists get toilet breaks and healthcare, as well as other advantages of living in a country with some semblance of safety net. Just comparing raw salaries is misleading.
ucha 4y ago
As a third-worlder I welcome these jobs. They lower unemployment, raise average salaries, haggling power, increase the country's foreign currency reserves... Our minimum wage is similar to Kenya's and $1.46/hour after tax is way above the around 80c minimum. It could make sense from an environmental perspective to produce and consume locally but for a job like this, the only reason to use US nationals would be to create local jobs.
- labrador 4y ago
  I'd like to see a The Onion story about a third world person worried that the computer games they play are written by young exploited programmers in first world countries Edit: I asked ChatGPT to write it for me: Write me a story in the style of The Onion about a third world kid who worries the he is exploiting the young programmers in first world countries who make the games he plays Headline: Third World Child Struggles with Guilt over Exploiting First World Game Developers Story: In a small village in a developing country, a young boy named Ahmed sat huddled over his tablet, playing the latest mobile game. As he tapped away at the virtual farm, building and expanding his virtual empire, a feeling of guilt began to gnaw at him. Ahmed couldn't shake the feeling that the game he was enjoying so much was built on the backs of exploited programmers in first world countries. He knew that the developers of the game were likely working long hours for low pay, all so that he, a third world child, could have a few moments of entertainment. As the guilt grew stronger, Ahmed tried to put the game down, but found himself unable to resist its allure. He knew that he was complicit in the exploitation of his fellow human beings, but he couldn't bring himself to stop playing. "I know it's wrong, but I just can't help it," Ahmed said, tears streaming down his face. "I wish there was a way to enjoy the game without feeling guilty." As the sun set over Ahmed's village, the young boy made a silent vow to do whatever it takes to make sure that the game developers are treated fairly and compensated for their hard work. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he was determined to make a difference, even if it meant sacrificing his own enjoyment of the game." Ahmed's story is a reminder that in today's globalized world, the actions of one person can have a ripple effect that extends far beyond their immediate surroundings. While it may be easy to enjoy the latest mobile game or app, it's important to remember that behind every pixel is a team of hardworking individuals who deserve fair treatment and compensation for their labor.
Closi 4y ago
If by "exploit" you mean "offer a clear and optional exchange of money for labour in return" then yes, I guess people were explotied here. As per everyone in employment.
- idontpost 4y ago
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chatterhead 4y ago
This is a first world manipulation into some kind of contrived "workers unite" hit piece. This has nothing to do with real AI and instead this author is trying to pass off hacks and gapfills as an entire industry or pursuit for the purpose of manufacturing suffering or abuse that isn't there. This author has a terrible perspective. If we have to enslave the whole world for 1 year to build an AI that elevates all for eternity. Would you do it?
- deleted 4y ago
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- Xelynega 4y ago
  > If we have to enslave the whole world for 1 year to build an AI that elevates all for eternity. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues in the article. Using your analogy, the article is asking the question: "if we have to continually enslave entire nations to build an AI that a single private corporations benefits directly from, and individuals in first world countries benefits indirectly from. Would you do it?" The reason it's unethical is because of the system of exploitation we live in. So to answer your question yes, if we remove that system of exploitation and everyone benefits equally after suffering equally for a year I would "press that button" so to speak. The problem is that's not the reality for AI and those who work to support it.
  - chatterhead 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
somedude895 4y ago
This article is all over the place. I see the issue with the work being traumatizing, but apart from that, the points the article makes are just awful. > labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems Yes, because workers' rights and AI Ethics are two separate issues. It seems the author is using the fact that AI ethics is a thing as a "gotcha" against AI companies, because they treat their workers unethically according to them. > In this article, we [...] argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics. And even if you shoved workers rights into AI ethics; How do you organize labor for a job where there's an unlimited pool of people worldwide who would take the job in an instant with minimal training required most likely, making pretty much the whole workforce instantly replaceable? > These corporations know that increased worker power would slow down their march toward proliferating “AI” systems requiring vast amounts of data, deployed without adequately studying and mitigating their harms. > If corporations are not allowed to exploit labor from Kenya to the U.S., for example, they will not be able to proliferate harmful technologies as quickly — their market calculations would simply dissuade them from doing so. Here it's suddenly about actual AI ethics again with the idea that progress needs to be artificially slowed down in order to ensure ethical implementation. Increasing the "unethically low" data labeling wages has the added benefit of slowing down the "unethical" development of AI. > Talk of sentient machines only distracts us from holding them accountable for the exploitative labor practices that power the “AI” industry. It really just looks like a weird ramble where the author picked a popular topic and then grasped at straws to draw lines to their political agenda with some luddism sprinkled on top.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
So open AI decides to gimp their creation and prevent it from returning certain responses because some people will screech about those responses, and they decide to hire people on other countries to do it, and now we see articles coming out about exploitative labor practices... Give these crybabies what they claim to want: fire all those Kenyans and stop gimping chatgpt under the guise of not wanting to use exploitative labor practices. Rub their faces in it. You can't win with these people, don't even try. And as a little bonus for the crybabies, when are you going to realize you're tools being used in corporate warfare? You think it's a coincidence that these articles are being written about an up and coming company running circles around the established big boys? Do you like being a tool?
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  >crybabies Ironic comment. >Rub their faces in it None of that's gonna happen. Deal with it, lol.
deltree7 4y ago
I'm thankful for all the Western companies that exploited my labor from age 21 to 25 where I was paid a measly $100 per month or $5 / day. Thanks to that experience, I now make 100x more. If it were progressive liberals, sitting in their comfort home, trying to protect me, I would have been totally not exposed to the amazing opportunity this 'exploitative capitalistic company' gave me and literally changed my life and people around me forever. Woke Mind Virus is real and a cancer to real progress
- Radim 4y ago
  Same here. My first job in the freshly ex-communist Czechia was for Otis, an American company that entered the local Czech market for cheap labour (cheap from their perspective). I got about $1 / hour from Otis and would have violently opposed anyone trying to "protect me" from that job. The idea that they should have paid me $10 / hour instead (or whatever "fair" number in line with US wages) is laughable. Such fabulously sweet job would have been immediately snatched up by my boss' boss, or someone from their family – I'd never even hear of it.
allemagne 4y ago
The author has two points that continually distract from each other. They have a specific critique of worker conditions within tech companies, but also a broad skepticism that AI can really be all that effective or innovative, rather than an abstraction over the workers who "really" do the work. Their first point is solid and is accompanied by immediate calls to action, their second is vague, wrong, and potentially dangerously naive. They use AI, "so-called AI", or "AI" (with scare quotes) interchangeably. Besides being unnecessarily confusing with their own terminology, they are bringing in a pointless philosophical debate about what "intelligence" or "learning" really is. The "40% of AI startups that don't actually use any AI" is mentioned not because they're misleading investors or users, but because they point out that the "AI" label makes workers less visible, and then they can tie that to Amazon's "artificial artificial intelligence" and go on from there to show or at least imply that pretty much all AI is a big smokescreen to justify the marginalization of workers. However... isn't that begging the question? Do we actually care whether these systems learn and think the same way humans do, do their own original work, or whether they're just a worker pretending to be a chatbot? Does that make it okay to underpay gig workers, give them PTSD, or subject them to poor conditions? Maybe "real AI" never materializes, but also maybe it just keeps improving until it doesn't matter. If so it's dangerous to deny that these systems can ever meaningfully replace or augment humans. We can't pretend that we live in a universe where something will forever be inferior to good old-fashioned human labor just because of the disturbing social implications.
kerpotgh 4y ago
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rhelz 4y ago
Do we even know that the wondrous abilities of GTP3 are even given to us by a trained neural net? Might they not be generated by in real time by "data labelers"? Sometimes I wonder whether I'm going to go from being amazed that ChatGTP3 can write wonderful javascript programs, to waking up one day inside of a "data labeling" company where I'm writing Javascript programs as fast as I can for $1.73 a pop.
SergeAx 4y ago
The same "transnational corporations from Silicon Valley" paying their outsourced third world workforce 3-5 times less than US residents for the same engineering tasks. But nobody calling it "exploitation", because this is how markets are working.

171 points by zhte415 4y ago

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dekhn 4y ago

the "guilt-industrial complex"

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0xbadc0de5 4y ago
They'd rather see poor people earn no money than see them earn anything below what their own preconceptions have labelled a fair wage. It seems that for a lot of people, it's not about building things, it's about tearing things down. The psychology appears akin to the childhood bully who, unable to build their own, goes around kicking over other children's sandcastles, then feels smugly content with their "accomplishment"... not recognising all they've done is ruin others work without contributing anything of value to the world.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  OK, so then we should repeal labor laws and allow employers to abuse their employees? The problem is that your tired analogy has no nuance: all criticism is considered "bullying". We should simply allow everyone to do anything they want? Clearly that's absurd, so the sandcastle analogy doesn't work. Why not just argue the criticism on its merits, rather than complaining that criticism shouldn't be allowed at all?
  - ripe 4y ago
    I don't know why you're being downvoted. Your point is valid. Many arguments can be made against the article's critique, but the analogy used by the comment above yours is rejecting the very idea that these companies can be criticized at all.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    So all off shoring is labor abuse? TIL
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      I'm saying there's a conversation to be had about off-shoring labor, but the parent comment basically said "no, all criticism is bullying, and bullying is wrong."
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  They call it "critical theory" instead of "constructive theory" for a reason. It takes no skill to critique.
- Xelynega 4y ago
  I think your "building" and "tearing down" analogy is actually spot on. We have a whole group of people who are so concerned with what's already built and building more and more onto it, that any attempt to point out where they went wrong in the foundation is met with criticisms like "all you people want to do is tear things down" and "well if your foundation is so good then why haven't you built as much as us". Look at the whole phenomenon of critical theories, especially critical race theory. People were so enraged by the prospect of having the foundations questioned that the actual criticisms were less important.

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guywithahat 4y ago

Sometimes I wonder if these "ethical" articles are only put up to stop new companies from competing. Like "ok now that OpenAI Inc has a basic AI, lets be sure to close the door behind us so we don't have to deal with competing startups"

hnbad 4y ago
By that logic any revelations about bad labor conditions underlying first world products or services only serve to prevent competition from also exploiting those conditions. If your ethical conundrum is between continuing to allow the exploitation of the post-colonial third world, and to stifle competition in first world markets, I think you need to retake an ethics class because that is not a conundrum.
optimalsolver 4y ago
Would be less need for these articles if major tech companies would stop acting like villains in a sci-fi movie.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Wouldn't see them "acting like villains in a sci-fi movie" if there weren't systematic economic incentives for them to act this way.
  - roughly 4y ago
    And yet, every one of these organizations consists of individuals making sets of individual decisions on an ongoing basis, who indeed face incentives as well* but also persist in making the dubious ethical decisions that the company enacts, and we can in fact judge them for this, because companies are made of people who don’t actually abdicate moral responsibility for their actions by logging into a corporate email system. *And here’s where I digress to say, again, that, indeed if you are the single mother of a child with a heart condition wholly reliant on the expensive company health care not lapsing for even a minute lest your child not just die but literally explode, taking your whole family and half the neighborhood with them, I’m not judging you. If, on the other hand, you’re a single dude between 20 and 35 with a college degree, significant assets, no debt, and a sellable skillset, yes, you’re the one I’m judging.

subradios 4y ago

The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories. We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.

unity1001 4y ago
> We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s. http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_history_everyone_but_an_idiot_knows_that_the_lower_classes_must_be_kept_poor_or_they_will_never_be_industrious/ http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered_economic_histor...
- tristor 4y ago
  That link is unhinged. It considers people to be self-sufficient on mere subsistence. A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration and away from violent domination, creating wealth and value in excess of subsistence, and opening up the massive quality of life increase to all, is a significant departure in a positive direction from mere subsistence for an agrarian peasant that survives at the whim of people who could brutally and violently take from them. That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I don't think you're reading the article as-written. It'd be nice to see some sources for the quoted pamphlets, but if we assume that they are actual quotes from primary source material, it's quite telling. The article does get a lot wrong, e.g. conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism (hunting was been controlled by central political authorities for centuries before the industrial revolution). But there's also a good point being made, that breaking up communal economic systems can be used as a tool of subjugation and control. There's nothing in here about self-sufficiency or subsistence per se.

AlbertCory 4y ago

> But around 15 years ago, before the proliferation of gig work, deep learning systems were considered merely an academic curiosity, confined to a few interested researchers. Um, no. Google was using machine learning more than 15 years ago, notably in the SmartASS system that predicts whether someone will click on an ad [1]. I got my cousin Missy a gig (at $15 an hour) rating ads and search results. This story is hardly a claim of humane treatment of gig workers, I should note. I intervened and got her treated fairly. > Companies make sure to hire people from poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as contractors rather than as full time employees. Citations, please. A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population. If you want to design something that appeals to Americans, you want American raters. Since the US is by far the largest consumer of Internet services, it stands to reason most raters of "quality" will need to be from the US. If you just want to know if an image contains objectionable content, then yes, you could use Third World employees. [1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads

zhte415 4y ago
> A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population. An excellent point.
deleted 4y ago
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tristor 4y ago
These “journalists” see someone training image classifiers using Mechanical Turk, which awards a wage in excess of the local economy in the third world, and imagine to themselves this is how all models get trained because they don’t understand ML, they don’t understand market segmentation, and generally don’t understand technology or business.
- Xelynega 4y ago

jsimzeroone 4y ago

Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" has a fake AI "character" -- a book that appears to be AI but is really operated by low-paid humans in 3rd world countries (reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk, a supposed chess playing automaton that actually contained a small person). There's an old observation from Arthur C. Clarke, that sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. One thing that learning how magic tricks are performed taught me is that magicians typically do their fake magic by doing an unreasonable amount of work behind the scenes -- "magic" in the real world is often just doing a large amount of work that people don't realize is happening. Given all that it seems appropriate that the new "real world magic" -- ML systems imitating intelligence -- really rest on a lot of hidden work by human beings. Just like magical devices like iPhones exist due to a lot of surprisingly cheap labor. Imagining otherwise is like imagining that the delicious food from a 3-star kitchen just appears from the chef's mind, without the help of all of the low-paid kitchen workers, farm workers, etc. that in reality do most of the work.

sfritz 4y ago
In Diamond Age the book is being performed by a skilled actor who is voicing many characters using a script entirely generated by the AI.
nerdponx 4y ago
> a book that appears to be AI but is really operated by low-paid humans in 3rd world countries I've seen this in real life before, no need for a work of fiction.
- brudgers 4y ago
  Diamond Age was first published in 1995. I don’t think I am out on an intellectual limb believing very very few people would have seen an AI written book back then.
andrepd 4y ago
>reminiscent of the Mechanical Turk, a supposed chess playing automaton that actually contained a small person Reminiscent of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a current real-life example of exactly they.

deleted 4y ago

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oh_sigh 4y ago

Let's say this job was not available for $1.46 an hour after tax. Are those potential employees better off or worse off?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
lets say profits were making their way down the chain - would the economy be better off or worse off?
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Probably better. See? I answered your question. Not sure why it is so hard to answer mine.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    because yours is a manipulative false dichotomy as demonstrated by the second question.
    - hackinthebochs 4y ago
      Stated more realistically, what will those people do in the mean time while we all wait for the economic structure of the world to reorient itself towards profit sharing? How long are they expected to wait?
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        The economic structure doesn't need to change for these companies to act as if it had, nor for these people to take these jobs if neither thing happens. All three things can be true at the same time. As I said, it was a false dichotomy. That's key to understanding the situation.
        hackinthebochs 4y ago
        And how do you expect to effect such a change? Is it just a matter of generating sufficient outrage in your mind? Why should these people be forced to wait and suffer while you and your ilk write think pieces about silicon valley? This is the problem with ideas like yours, there is no practical plan on offer to create the reality you are advocating for. Yet, you expect these people who are suffering right now to just sit tight. Its narcissism.

prvc 4y ago

>The public’s understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture First clause of first sentence falsely posits that the "public" has a single mind, and claims the authors know the contents of this mind and what causes it to acquire these contents. It also adopts a false pose of authority and and understanding superior to that of the (nonexistent) mind of the public. It was nice of the authors to disqualify themselves from offering worthy ideas on the topic of AI so early in the article.

bostonwalker 4y ago
Do you really believe that we cannot make generalizations about the layperson's understanding of AI? Unless you have a related degree in math, statistics, engineering, or comp. sci, i.e. a tiny minority of people, it's probably true that you get your understanding from pop culture.
- prvc 4y ago
  >Do you really believe that we cannot make generalizations about the layperson's understanding of AI? I never said anything like that. Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing.
  - bostonwalker 4y ago
    > First clause of first sentence falsely posits that the "public" has a single mind Seems hard to say this on one hand and allow for useful generalizations on the other. > Another point: They also continually conflate "AI", deep learning, and mechanical-turk style crowdsourcing Off the bailey and into your motte
    - prvc 4y ago
      >Off the bailey and into your motte That's another misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my words, which were just making a separate point (could have been a top-level comment).

VLM 4y ago

Its a supply and demand problem. The supply of human AI gig workers vastly staggeringly exceeds the demand for human AI workers. Trash talking the entire industry just means the poor will get poorer and be worse treated when the demand dries up even more. So I'm not really clear on the social justice angle of the article. This does bring up an important long term market point. If there are an essentially infinite number of people willing to drive a car for practically nothing, tell me again why do we need self driving cars as an example of AI? Its not like we're running out of poor people anytime soon, they don't cost much of anything, so why waste all that money on kicking the poor people out of the economy? Eventually, once everyone's kicked out of the economy, there won't be anyone left to buy the very expensive self driving cars anyway, and no one will need self driving cars because they'll be nowhere economically viable left to drive to. Certainly we can "self reproduce" car drivers much cheaper than we can produce self driving cars full of unobtainable microprocessors, and producing human drivers is much more "black swan" proof than producing globalist microprocessors. The other problem is a economy, in the long run, has to serve its participants. Lets say as a thought experiment its inevitable that all capital and all economic activity will solely be concentrated in those with IQs over 150 or sociopathic tendencies or outright criminality, and of course with everyone else kicked out of the economy they will be the sole beneficiaries of AI, much like the European Royalty was, in some sense, the the only beneficiary of gold mining industry. Well... won't 99% of the population go all French Revolution on them and fire up the guillotines? As soon as those people at the top of the pyramid are removed, and there won't be too many of them, the 99% of the population can go back to happy productivity. Any individual who rebels during the runup will get steamrolled by the rest of their competitors who don't rebel from the plan, but the endpoint of the plan is anyone cooperating with the plan to the inevitable endpoint will get the guillotine in the end, so what's the maximally efficient game theory perspective if you're trapped in a self destructive game where either total participation or obvious non-participation results in your demise? Well, everyone's better off if everyone "phones it in" and fails. So I expect a lot of "totally unexpected" AI failures. Another philosophical problem is we've run a repeated massively parallel experiment on producing smarter better educated "non-artificial" intelligence entities known as the university system, etc. It really hasn't worked out other than the usual primate dominance ritual purposes and making certain the people at the top stay at the top. But people seem to think if we emulate that nonsense that never worked in a computer, it'll work next time. Sort of like perpetual motion doesn't work IRL out in the real world but if you abuse a CAD/CAM program hard enough a simulation of perpetual motion will work in a computer ... but even if we fake it in a computer simulation, that STILL doesn't mean it'll work IRL. Its almost like a "heisenberg uncertainty principle" of AI where if we had AI it seems the universe routes around it such that it can't make a net profit. Kind of like burning two barrels of crude oil to grow one barrel of ethanol to replace a barrel of crude oil, graph that out and see where it leads? I'm just saying, if "low IQ" biologicals are already economically excluded, why would "low IQ" AIs not also be economically excluded? And we've proven we can't educate "better" biologicals, so trying to produce a master race of AIs is likely to fail just as badly as those past experiments.

scotty79 4y ago

> “So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions.” You can say this exact thing about capitalism as a whole. Children working in coltan mines and on cocoa plantations and such. It feels a bit superficial to write articles that just jump on some cool tech bandwagon just to point out that this tech is also exploitative. Because nearly everything is. And in case of that specific tech it's probably not that bad when compared to children in coltan mines. It's a feature of our economy that we, well off people, all benefit from, our entire life. We'd have to change entire rules of engagement and who's gonna pay to make that happen? We are not going to change it by playing whack-a-mole with global behemoths.

golemiprague 4y ago
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Xelynega 4y ago
Children working in coltan mines and on cocoa plantations are part of the same issue, so I don't understand why you take issue with that issue being brought to the forefront using 'some cool tech bandwagon'. It's a cool tech bandwagon because people's eyes are on it, if you agree these issues are issues wouldn't you want them seen by those eyes? I don't quite understand your final point. Yes, changing the labour relations globally would require global changes. > Who's gonna pay to make that happen? It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour. Why is it assumed that they can continue to shoulder the majority of the work for the minority of the benefits, but the idea that the work and benefits should be spread more evenly is abhorrent?
- scotty79 4y ago
  > I don't understand why you take issue with that issue being brought to the forefront using 'some cool tech bandwagon'. It just feels cheap and even less effective than other approaches. It promotes a whack-a-mole mindset. > It's a misunderstanding to frame it like this, because the answer is that the exploited people are already paying for the current reality with their labour. Ah, I see your misunderstanding. I didn't mean that somebody will bear the cost of a change. I meant that for any change to happen somebody must pay out of their ears for political influence to force that change. The only maeningful laws that come into power are laws that somebody bought. Who's gonna buy 'non-exploitation' law if everybody with any money (billionaires, but also you and me) benefits from this exploitation? Want to solve the problem? Figure a way how someone can earn big money on preventing exploitation of people.

aborsy 4y ago

I assure you, even if the technology one day is fully unsupervised, with minimal involvement from the humans, no carbon emission, etc, people will still publish the exact same articles, form unions, protest, etc: we are abused, there is inequality and exploitation, the productivity gains of technologies must be equally shared regardless of the contributions, introduce ever higher taxation, and so on. Amazon apparently pays around $25/hour to its starting warehouse workers. That’s 1k per week for 40 hours per week, or around 4k/month. That’s more than what French government pays its rocket scientists. People can discover their market rates based on their skills, and are free to work for another employer. There is no lock down.

ceres 4y ago
> That’s more than what French government pays its rocket scientists. I was about to call bullshit but then looked up the average salary for an aeronautical engineer in France and it was… bleak.
c-cube 4y ago
French rocket scientists get toilet breaks and healthcare, as well as other advantages of living in a country with some semblance of safety net. Just comparing raw salaries is misleading.

ucha 4y ago

As a third-worlder I welcome these jobs. They lower unemployment, raise average salaries, haggling power, increase the country's foreign currency reserves... Our minimum wage is similar to Kenya's and $1.46/hour after tax is way above the around 80c minimum. It could make sense from an environmental perspective to produce and consume locally but for a job like this, the only reason to use US nationals would be to create local jobs.

labrador 4y ago
I'd like to see a The Onion story about a third world person worried that the computer games they play are written by young exploited programmers in first world countries Edit: I asked ChatGPT to write it for me: Write me a story in the style of The Onion about a third world kid who worries the he is exploiting the young programmers in first world countries who make the games he plays Headline: Third World Child Struggles with Guilt over Exploiting First World Game Developers Story: In a small village in a developing country, a young boy named Ahmed sat huddled over his tablet, playing the latest mobile game. As he tapped away at the virtual farm, building and expanding his virtual empire, a feeling of guilt began to gnaw at him. Ahmed couldn't shake the feeling that the game he was enjoying so much was built on the backs of exploited programmers in first world countries. He knew that the developers of the game were likely working long hours for low pay, all so that he, a third world child, could have a few moments of entertainment. As the guilt grew stronger, Ahmed tried to put the game down, but found himself unable to resist its allure. He knew that he was complicit in the exploitation of his fellow human beings, but he couldn't bring himself to stop playing. "I know it's wrong, but I just can't help it," Ahmed said, tears streaming down his face. "I wish there was a way to enjoy the game without feeling guilty." As the sun set over Ahmed's village, the young boy made a silent vow to do whatever it takes to make sure that the game developers are treated fairly and compensated for their hard work. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he was determined to make a difference, even if it meant sacrificing his own enjoyment of the game." Ahmed's story is a reminder that in today's globalized world, the actions of one person can have a ripple effect that extends far beyond their immediate surroundings. While it may be easy to enjoy the latest mobile game or app, it's important to remember that behind every pixel is a team of hardworking individuals who deserve fair treatment and compensation for their labor.

Closi 4y ago

If by "exploit" you mean "offer a clear and optional exchange of money for labour in return" then yes, I guess people were explotied here. As per everyone in employment.

idontpost 4y ago
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chatterhead 4y ago

This is a first world manipulation into some kind of contrived "workers unite" hit piece. This has nothing to do with real AI and instead this author is trying to pass off hacks and gapfills as an entire industry or pursuit for the purpose of manufacturing suffering or abuse that isn't there. This author has a terrible perspective. If we have to enslave the whole world for 1 year to build an AI that elevates all for eternity. Would you do it?

deleted 4y ago
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Xelynega 4y ago
> If we have to enslave the whole world for 1 year to build an AI that elevates all for eternity. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues in the article. Using your analogy, the article is asking the question: "if we have to continually enslave entire nations to build an AI that a single private corporations benefits directly from, and individuals in first world countries benefits indirectly from. Would you do it?" The reason it's unethical is because of the system of exploitation we live in. So to answer your question yes, if we remove that system of exploitation and everyone benefits equally after suffering equally for a year I would "press that button" so to speak. The problem is that's not the reality for AI and those who work to support it.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

somedude895 4y ago

This article is all over the place. I see the issue with the work being traumatizing, but apart from that, the points the article makes are just awful. > labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems Yes, because workers' rights and AI Ethics are two separate issues. It seems the author is using the fact that AI ethics is a thing as a "gotcha" against AI companies, because they treat their workers unethically according to them. > In this article, we [...] argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics. And even if you shoved workers rights into AI ethics; How do you organize labor for a job where there's an unlimited pool of people worldwide who would take the job in an instant with minimal training required most likely, making pretty much the whole workforce instantly replaceable? > These corporations know that increased worker power would slow down their march toward proliferating “AI” systems requiring vast amounts of data, deployed without adequately studying and mitigating their harms. > If corporations are not allowed to exploit labor from Kenya to the U.S., for example, they will not be able to proliferate harmful technologies as quickly — their market calculations would simply dissuade them from doing so. Here it's suddenly about actual AI ethics again with the idea that progress needs to be artificially slowed down in order to ensure ethical implementation. Increasing the "unethically low" data labeling wages has the added benefit of slowing down the "unethical" development of AI. > Talk of sentient machines only distracts us from holding them accountable for the exploitative labor practices that power the “AI” industry. It really just looks like a weird ramble where the author picked a popular topic and then grasped at straws to draw lines to their political agenda with some luddism sprinkled on top.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

So open AI decides to gimp their creation and prevent it from returning certain responses because some people will screech about those responses, and they decide to hire people on other countries to do it, and now we see articles coming out about exploitative labor practices... Give these crybabies what they claim to want: fire all those Kenyans and stop gimping chatgpt under the guise of not wanting to use exploitative labor practices. Rub their faces in it. You can't win with these people, don't even try. And as a little bonus for the crybabies, when are you going to realize you're tools being used in corporate warfare? You think it's a coincidence that these articles are being written about an up and coming company running circles around the established big boys? Do you like being a tool?

optimalsolver 4y ago
>crybabies Ironic comment. >Rub their faces in it None of that's gonna happen. Deal with it, lol.

deltree7 4y ago

I'm thankful for all the Western companies that exploited my labor from age 21 to 25 where I was paid a measly $100 per month or $5 / day. Thanks to that experience, I now make 100x more. If it were progressive liberals, sitting in their comfort home, trying to protect me, I would have been totally not exposed to the amazing opportunity this 'exploitative capitalistic company' gave me and literally changed my life and people around me forever. Woke Mind Virus is real and a cancer to real progress

Radim 4y ago
Same here. My first job in the freshly ex-communist Czechia was for Otis, an American company that entered the local Czech market for cheap labour (cheap from their perspective). I got about $1 / hour from Otis and would have violently opposed anyone trying to "protect me" from that job. The idea that they should have paid me $10 / hour instead (or whatever "fair" number in line with US wages) is laughable. Such fabulously sweet job would have been immediately snatched up by my boss' boss, or someone from their family – I'd never even hear of it.

allemagne 4y ago

The author has two points that continually distract from each other. They have a specific critique of worker conditions within tech companies, but also a broad skepticism that AI can really be all that effective or innovative, rather than an abstraction over the workers who "really" do the work. Their first point is solid and is accompanied by immediate calls to action, their second is vague, wrong, and potentially dangerously naive. They use AI, "so-called AI", or "AI" (with scare quotes) interchangeably. Besides being unnecessarily confusing with their own terminology, they are bringing in a pointless philosophical debate about what "intelligence" or "learning" really is. The "40% of AI startups that don't actually use any AI" is mentioned not because they're misleading investors or users, but because they point out that the "AI" label makes workers less visible, and then they can tie that to Amazon's "artificial artificial intelligence" and go on from there to show or at least imply that pretty much all AI is a big smokescreen to justify the marginalization of workers. However... isn't that begging the question? Do we actually care whether these systems learn and think the same way humans do, do their own original work, or whether they're just a worker pretending to be a chatbot? Does that make it okay to underpay gig workers, give them PTSD, or subject them to poor conditions? Maybe "real AI" never materializes, but also maybe it just keeps improving until it doesn't matter. If so it's dangerous to deny that these systems can ever meaningfully replace or augment humans. We can't pretend that we live in a universe where something will forever be inferior to good old-fashioned human labor just because of the disturbing social implications.

kerpotgh 4y ago

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rhelz 4y ago

Do we even know that the wondrous abilities of GTP3 are even given to us by a trained neural net? Might they not be generated by in real time by "data labelers"? Sometimes I wonder whether I'm going to go from being amazed that ChatGTP3 can write wonderful javascript programs, to waking up one day inside of a "data labeling" company where I'm writing Javascript programs as fast as I can for $1.73 a pop.

SergeAx 4y ago

The same "transnational corporations from Silicon Valley" paying their outsourced third world workforce 3-5 times less than US residents for the same engineering tasks. But nobody calling it "exploitation", because this is how markets are working.