The Fairwork trio talk about their new book on the ‘extraction machine’, exposing the repetitive labour, often in terrible conditions, that big tech is using to create artificial intelligence * Meet Mercy and Anita – the African workers driving the AI revolution, for just over a dollar an hour James Muldoon is a reader in management at the University of Essex, Mark Graham a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and Callum Cant a senior lecturer at the University of Essex business school. They work together at Fairwork, a project that appraises the working conditions in digital workplaces, and they are co-authors of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI. Why did you write the book? James Muldoon: The idea for the book emerged out of field work we did in Kenya and Uganda on the data annotation industry. We spoke to a number of data annotators, and the working conditions were just horrendous. And we thought this is a story that everyone needs to hear. People working for less than $2 an hour on insecure contracts, work that is predominantly outsourced to the global south because of how difficult and dangerous it can be. Continue reading...