The unspoken application of AI: further exploitation of the Global Majority
AI, for all of its potential applications, has become yet another funnel for outsourcing labor and draining resources from the Global Majority. International AI companies are exploiting Kenyan workers to label their content, while ravaging the Congo for cobalt to build the hardware to develop the AI on. Most recently (and perhaps most on the nose) the “AI” behind Amazon’s shuttered “Just Walk Out” technology was revealed to actually just be one thousand Indian workers manually reviewing videos.
Conversations in the Silicon Valley often revolve around how AI can automate repetitive tasks to free up more time for more interesting pursuits. We don’t have to spend the day poring over Excel spreadsheets anymore! We can now embrace our more intellectual, creative sides — AI can even create our art for us! We say our labor can finally be outsourced to AI, but is that really the end of the conversation? This shiny new hyped up technology is distracting us from reaching for actual equity.
“Democratizing access” has become one of the latest buzzwords to tout the benefits of AI. Of course, this democratization is only happening for a certain strata of society. It certainly does not pertain to the laborers who built the very foundation of the technology that we so idolize. Nor the people who are labelling this data, nor the people who the development is often outsourced to. They also don’t even get to reap the benefits of these systems. Generative AI is inherently less accessible to those who do not speak Standard American English as a first language. These people are conveniently located far out of direct sight from San Francisco’s tech bubble. We can continue our conversations about how AI is making our lives so much easier while ignoring the voices outside of the room.
AI has become another tool to stratify people into those who must continue being exploited and those whose time can be freed up. The conversation needs to go deeper beyond lightening the load of white-collar workers, to empower all workers, especially those in the Global Majority. Otherwise, these novel technologies are only perpetuating the same centuries-old cycles of class disparity.
