Turns out that Venezuelans have a stellar contribution in the self-driving car industry. Did you know this?
Next time you hear about the wonderful future of self-driving cars, picture this: Venezuelans, living in crisis conditions after their economy collapsed, sitting at laptops and outlining pictures of trees and bikes so that the robotic vehicles don’t crash. For a task-based fee that bordered on slavery.
Am reading ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao – an insightful book into the inner workings of (not so) Open AI and the artificial industry in general. An eye-opener, well written and detailed. A must-read for everyone who wants to know how AI came to this stage, steered by a handful of people and a lot of exploitation along the way.
The Venezuela part was something I didn’t know before, and it was a bit depressing even.
Working on data-annotation platforms became a whole-family activity. Julian Posada, an assistant professor at Yale University who interviewed dozens of Venezuelan workers, found that parents and children often took turns to work on a shared computer; wives reverted to cooking and cleaning to allow their husbands to earn just a little more money by pulling longer hours uninterrupted.
The industry chose Kenya for doing the exact same tasks but for generative AI, making contractors read the deepest thoughts of humankind scared from the darker parts of the internet, explicit descriptions of self-harm, violence, sexual assault and pervertedness, resulting in mental health problems and depression, all for a pittance in return.
The author titled her book to draw a parallel between the empires of the early Middle Ages and the colonizers, and today’s technology empires. She says:
“Looking back several years later, that’s exactly what happened-and what has become one of the most stunning parallels between empires of old and empires of Al. One of the defining features that drives an empire’s rapid accumulation of wealth is its ability to pay very little or nothing at all to reap the economic benefits of a broad base of human labor.”
I am reading another book called ‘Adam’s Tongue’, on the origins of language, and it had a passage that was quite relatable to the bits that I drew your attention to above.
But it’s too early yet to junk selfish genes. What look like behaviors “for the good of the species” may well turn out to be purely self-serving behaviors that happen, quite incidentally, to benefit the species as a whole. Dubious though it may be when pushed too far, the selfish gene notion has lit up too many areas of behavior to be lightly tossed aside.
We are selfish by nature, it’s in our genes. And it shows. For all the paper straws that you use, deep down, you don’t care about damn about how the cheap clothes are made, or how Chat GPT throws up these magical answers, most of it for free.
By the way, another missile alert, and so time to step away. More important matters to attend to:)
See you tomorrow!