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Minimum wage ‘ghosts’ keep AI arms race from becoming a nightmare
- hypothesis 4y agoUsing RTO to punish disabled folks for demanding better wages is just something that AI would come up with, right?
- wizzwizz4 4y agoIf you consider existing AI computer systems, no: they're not powerful enough. If you mean non-human human-created intelligences, then our institutions could count: in which case, yes it is.
- hourago 4y ago> “We make some of the lowest wages in the U.S.,” Stackhouse, who has been a rater for nearly a decade, says. “I personally make $3 less per hour than my daughter working in fast food.” > Stackhouse has a serious heart condition requiring medical management, but his employer, Appen — whose sole client is Google — caps his hours at 26 per week, keeping him part-time, and ineligible for benefits. What a cruel system.
- throw009 4y agoIf you don't like a job find one that pays better. I was working something similar at university and rather enjoyed being paid to read the news and summarise them. I didn't want it to be a career and neither did the company I worked for.
- DoctorOW 4y ago...and what happens when you can't find one? The narrative that there are all these jobs being turned down is false. The jobs that would hire someone like Stackhouse are all pretty much the same as the one he has. This wouldn't matter so much if it wasn't matter of a life and death but they won't even let someone survive anymore.
- throw009 4y agoWhy we all go to your house and you start paying us to do jobs that you don't value. This is the new safety net and it's an improvement in expecting a corporation to do it.
- charcircuit 4y agoYou make yourself more attractive to employers by acquiring or improving your skills or learning to market yourself better.
- surement 4y ago> and what happens when you can't find one? sounds like what you're saying is that without this employer, this employee would have a worse or no job; if you start from that and then give them this job then it sounds pretty positive > they won't even let someone survive anymore. who's they?
- DoctorOW 4y agoYou're circling the answer. Every industry is experiencing a massive amount of consolidation. While people have discussed the lack of competition's impacts on consumers, this is getting close to mentioning that even though there are technically more jobs there's fewer actual employers.
- surement 4y agodo you have data to back that up?
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- DoctorOW 4y agoI can't find a good actual link to the entire data set with but looking at the data in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' website you can see both the average number of hours worked are trending downwards, having not been above the 35 hour threshold for a full time job since the 1980's. I have not found reputable data that differentiates full time employed into "One full-time job" vs. "Multiple part time jobs". Chart: https://i.imgur.com/Ah5YKd0.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Ah5YKd0.jpg
- throwbadubadu 4y agoYou have been downvoted, but I also wonder a bit what the real story (or debate) is here. Some jobs will pay the lowest wage... that it is these jobs? I actually would rate and expect these jobs pay lower than the typical lowest pay jobs which require physical labor like the typical low pay jobs in fast food, or building cleaning? Or the specific amount given current circumstances? True.. on the other hand still well above the minimum wage by law in most European countries.. maybe not comparable well, but still not much out of range. That rich companies pay low wages? Yeah, absurd and unfair, but that unfortunately never hold a rich company back where it could just pay that (I'd like different regulation here). So the problem is really independent of these specific jobs or companies? And the answer to this is better regulation and worker protection laws, that many frown upon?
- lovich 4y agoWhen companies are paying so low that the workers can’t support themselves(which US minimum wage does not pay enough for) then the companies are not working for societies benefit. They are getting subsidized by whatever welfare their employees are getting, such as the famous example of Walmart teaching their employees to sign up for food stamps. They are also refusing to engage in the type of innovation that capitalism is supposed to generate in the face of scarce goods, because they aren’t paying for this externality. Much in the same way that you can’t pay an industry supplying you with critical parts forever because then the parts will eventually stop being built, companies shouldn’t be allowed to pay for less than the necessary amount to support the workers living. If this makes the job they are doing not valuable enough then the companies shouldn’t be engaged in the work that can’t be profitable without subsidies, ask the government for specific earmarked subsidizes if it generates a positive externality, or actually do some innovation and figure out a way to make the work profitable
- throwbadubadu 4y ago> companies are not working for societies benefit That was my point, or "really?" Again, I'd like it to be more that way, but given current laws and what most people agree to: Do they even have to? No!
- flangola7 4y agoAh yes, the mythical land of jobbies. Unfortunately we need solutions that work in real life and not an Ayn Rand fantasy.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoUnfortunately the cruel system will continue to persist as long as people refuse to acknowledge it's existence.
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- tbrownaw 4y ago> caps his hours at 26 per week, keeping him part-time, and ineligible for benefits. Benefits should not be yes/no at some hours-per-week cutoff. Or really, they shouldn't be a thing. Fix any tax bs that makes it cheaper for employers to pay for them rather than employees and remove any rules that say employees have to provide them. ... err, I guess time off might count as a benefit, so make sure any rules scale linearly all the way to zero. How much an employee costs shouldn't have sudden jumps at particular numbers of hours. Employees shouldn't depend on their employees for anything more than a (fungible, because it's just money) paycheck.
- kevviiinn 4y agoAlmost like there should be a system of healthcare not tied to employment or income
- crooked-v 4y agoIf we can ever get Medicare For All in place in the US, the biggest benefits anchors will evaporate all at once.
- antifa 4y agoWhy move the Rube Goldberg machine from employment to corporate tax codes when we can just have Medicare For All?
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/5IiPc https://archive.ph/5IiPc
- startupsfail 4y agoI once saw a business co-Founder joining a startup from Google, around a decade back. Leaving his 500k Googler salary to be a Founder at a hot startup. He was from Indian origins and an Ivy League MBA. His first contribution, besides joining with his credentials was to cut down a few cents per hour from what we’ve been paying to a sweatshop some place in India. That was annotating images for us. From somewhat strange biases in the annotated data, it was likely that this sweatshop was employing children. Incidentally, Google had acquihired that startup.
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- IIAOPSW 4y ago[flagged]
- Entinel 4y agoExplain how this is "arguably better than school"
- lovich 4y agoWell, if you already value these people at pennys per hour, he probably doesn’t see the value in educating them.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoDo you remember grade school at all. Endless busy work. Teacher hands out a worksheet, any worksheet, just an endless stream of pointless word searches, fill in the blanks, answer these instances of x+y=_ , color by number, write a paragraph in this box, draw hands on this clock etc. Let's be real, below around 8th grade school is mostly socialized babysitting, and these worksheets are in large part there so teacher can keep you all preoccupied with literally anything. Its all equally tedious and just as pointless as say, adding captions to stock photos or pointing out all the traffic lights in an image. The difference is one of them pays and the other doesn't.
- profstasiak 4y agowhat a dystopia. Was it ever predicted in any science fiction book? Maybe the economists are right - AI wont make us all unemployed. The only problem is, our only jobs will be such abhorent as these ones those poor people have, improving the next version of AI
- visarga 4y agoIt is hard for me to compute this. AI engineers know very well the value of good training data. They all get to label some, they get close and personal with it. But when it comes to job titles and perks, it's like the labelling people are inferior. I have worked as a ML engineer close with internal labelling teams and let me tell you, not everyone could do it. It is a hard job, and often requires deep thinking to solve. Many ML engineers themselves are actually bad at labelling. And the contribution of the labelling team can be equal sized or more important than that of the ML engineers. In normal conditions you need at least one labelling person / engineer, all projects need labelling, there's never a gap, labelling is never finished. Finding a good labeller is also hard - not everyone on the street could do it, contrary to public expectations.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoLike a really good tester ?
- layer8 4y agoHow do you assess labelling quality? What I’m wondering is, how would the feedback loop work, in the longer term, between quality of AI output and paying/selecting labellers?
- BitJockey 4y ago> How do you assess labelling quality? You have multiple people to label the same piece of data. This increases accuracy of labeling and help to spot bad labelers.
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- febeling 4y agoInteresting to learn who’s the single source of truth about propaganda classification. This uneducated „rater“ on minimal wage, training a search engine is probably maximally dependent on the job. What could go wrong?
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- Frummy 4y agoI remember working for Appen as a teenager. I saw it as a video game and became really really fast at labeling and quality assurance. Since it's linear work without hard thinking it became this sort of muscle memory thing. I remember some different projects, voice assistant for some car company that gave directions and took commands to change settings in the car, neural net for dog pictures, helpfulness and accuracy of search results, map stuff ,a big excel that I translated last minute to swedish and got like a bonus for doing late at night for them, probably other stuff as well. Wasn't worth it for the time spent getting up to context to work on a task and really low pay but fun to infer company secrets from tasks that I worked on
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoThis is because the data is fundamentally and inextricably embedded with anti-social sentiments[1]: language embedded with sentiments reflecting competition and fear rather than cooperation and mutual aid sentiments. All that nightmare data (which we generate, look I'm doing it now), is a reflection of the joys and traumas of people writing it, and if the majority of the NLP chat data is anti-social then there is no possible other outcome. You cannot fix this with more "filtering" as the data is embedded in almost all written text. You have to change the sentiment. [1]https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2016/projects/cs224w-35-final.pdf https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2016/projects/cs224w-...
- catiopatio 4y agoWhy is this work worth more money than Google is currently paying? This is not a job that requires rare or difficult to acquire skills, nor is there a shortage of people willing to do the work. The main subject — who appears to work from home and set his own hours — complains that his hourly wage is $2 less than his daughter working in fast food. I’d argue she has a much more demanding job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]