#680 [Redacted Tonight] - The Hidden Workers Behind AI
Moment of Clarity
Lee Camp
4.8 • 671 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Microwork is a rising form of labor exploitation being deployed by some of the world’s wealthiest capitalists. It’s online work where users are asked to perform menial, small tasks for pennies. Naomi Karavani takes on the phenomenon and shows us the victims of the industry. The low-paid work includes tasks like identifying the contents of images, translating, transcribing audio, or any task that someone on the site is willing to pay for. These tasks can become abusive where workers have been sexually harassed by the people setting the tasks. Jeff Bezos has a company called Mechanical Turk that competes for microwork jobs. Vulnerable people such as refugees and those living in occupied territories are the target worker for the microwork industry.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're ready for a new job, let Express employment professionals help you. |
| 0:04.2 | Express is already hiring for summer jobs in a variety of industries. |
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| 0:10.3 | Go to ExpressPros.com to find your location. |
| 0:13.4 | That's ExpressPros.com. |
| 0:16.3 | Let's roll, let's roll, never get their control. |
| 0:20.2 | They've got their money, but we've got our soul. Let's roll, let's roll, never get their control. They've got their money, but we've got our soul. |
| 0:22.6 | Let's roll, let's roll, never get their control. |
| 0:26.6 | It's ain't got their money, but we've got our soul. Welcome to Redacted tonight. So it seems like everywhere we're seeing the signs of automation, |
| 0:39.9 | which makes a lot of people feel uneasy. But I don't get why. Some of my best friends are robots. |
| 0:47.8 | What's so weird about a self-checkout machine at CVS wishing you and your family a happy Hanukkah? |
| 0:53.8 | Why does it make you so uncomfortable |
| 0:55.8 | when the caring Verizon customer service chat bot asks about your mild lupus? It's not disturbing |
| 1:03.5 | that these guys know where I live after they delivered food once, and sure they visit, but it's not |
| 1:10.6 | creepy. They're my friends. But did you know that |
| 1:14.7 | some of our automated friends aren't automated at all? In fact, there's a large amount of |
| 1:19.9 | human labor that gets hidden behind so-called algorithms. It's also known as micro-work. |
| 1:26.8 | Microwork is a series of small, tedious tasks that workers often in the global South get paid pennies to complete. |
| 1:34.1 | Many of these workers live in prisons or refugee camps. |
| 1:37.4 | Their work powers the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, the richest tech companies in the world. |
| 1:45.6 | Profit off the labor from the most poorly paid, poorly protected workers in the poorest parts of the world. |
| 1:52.1 | So I found out my best robot friend who just gets me with its sophisticated algorithm |
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