[HN Gopher] The African workers driving the AI revolution, for a...
___________________________________________________________________
The African workers driving the AI revolution, for about a dollar
an hour
Author : rntn
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-07-06 21:26 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| teractiveodular wrote:
| > _Nobody ever leaves the BPO willingly - there's nothing else to
| do. She sees her ex-colleagues when she's on her way to work,
| hawking vegetables on the market or trying to sell popcorn by the
| side of the road. If there were other opportunities, people would
| seize them. She just has to keep her head down, hit her targets,
| and make sure that whatever happens, she doesn't get laid off._
|
| And this is the kicker: it's all very well for us to wring our
| hands about how their conditions could be better, but people are
| voluntarily choosing to do jobs like this because it's still
| better than the alternatives. Staring at video footage for 8
| hours a day to get paid a dollar an hour sucks, but it sucks less
| than walking around in a traffic jam in the African sun, trying
| to hawk bags of popcorn to drivers and constantly risking getting
| run over with no certainty of getting paid.
| mthld wrote:
| Yeah. Look at all the benefits of colonization in African
| countries. Look at the great job we are doing. Giving them
| money to alienate themselves looking at the shit we produce.
| Such a great advancement for humanity. Thanks lord for bringing
| civilization to the savages
| infecto wrote:
| No doubt the impact of Europe on Africa has hurt but are
| brining jobs to Africa a bad thing? At this point Africa
| probably receives more harm from its own residents than
| outside influences.
|
| Nobody said anything about savages. Please don't bring
| negativity into a conversation.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Trade and colonization aren't the same thing. People are
| taking these jobs because they're better than the
| alternative, sad as it is.
|
| If developed countries all refused to outsource work like
| this to poorer countries, do you think that would help the
| condition of the people there?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm all for better working conditions,
| but ultimately that _is_ primarily the responsibility of the
| government(s) of that country.
| mthld wrote:
| And where do you think these governments comes from? Why do
| you think they are in such a precarious situation?
|
| Maybe colonialism has something to do with it, hasn't it?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| If you asked the people of these countries why their
| country and government are in this situation, what do you
| think they'd say?
| mthld wrote:
| Read for yourself:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7afrique
| notjoemama wrote:
| Not great to link a wiki covering many other countries
| outside of Africa without specifying What exactly your
| point is. I read it and none of it surprised me.
|
| You do realize a great deal of the US meddling was
| prompted by USSR/Russian meddling, right? I'm not giving
| the US a pass by saying that, but the Cold War and threat
| of nuclear annihilation is a backdrop to many of these
| events.
|
| I'm also not going to ignore the issues the countries
| within Africa deal with that have nothing to do with
| their past of imperialism or colonialism. I could point
| to India as a country that reformed into a modern
| successful nation post colonialism. Nor ought we ignore
| the vast amounts of financial aid given so often to these
| countries. It's a tangled difficult problem.
|
| I suspect you have more ire than foundation.
| meiraleal wrote:
| You can read by yourself, Africa has leaders beyond the
| warlords the west make "partnerships" to steal resources.
| Ask them and illuminate yourself.
|
| 'The exit came as the trio shifted away from former
| colonial ruler France, with Tiani calling for the new
| bloc to become a "community far removed from the
| stranglehold of foreign powers." '
|
| https://www.voanews.com/a/sahel-military-chiefs-form-
| confede...
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| So we should now exclude them from global labor markets
| because colonialism?
| solveit wrote:
| Your rhetoric falls flat against any infant mortality chart.
|
| > alienate themselves
|
| Sounds like a first-world problem to me.
| notjoemama wrote:
| I just read this covering the history of Kenya's colonialism
| and independence. (Mercy, from the article, works for a Meta
| office in Nairobi, Kenya)
|
| https://www.britannica.com/place/Kenya/Kenya-colony
|
| What about the last 60 years free of colonial rule connects
| to the current state today? Do you think these corporate
| interests stem from Kenya's Building Bridges Initiative?
|
| I ask because I recently listened to a podcast about China's
| Belt and Road Initiative winding down in Africa. I was
| surprised to hear this because they had committed to a large
| infusion of capital with some future trade partnerships (tens
| of billions at least). It was set to be a massive boon for
| much of Africa after the US reduced its economic aid in the
| region. Their reasoning was (economic woes in China aside),
| they found too much was unstable, specifically legislatively
| and socially. Permits and licenses drug out where most of the
| time it was difficult to know which official was in charge of
| which responsibilities. Also, they would build a facility
| that would be repeatedly attacked and destroyed by warlords
| in the area. I believe they said it was common to lose
| workers to independent gangs.
|
| Just wondering if you could expand on what you said so I can
| connect the same dots. I'm not understanding your critique.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I honestly think African workers should continue to get
| "exploited" like this. This is the exact same way China got
| exploited and that let them bootstrap their entire roaring
| economy. Not to mention, hawking at intersections isn't as bad
| as it gets in some parts of Africa. Literally dying of hunger
| is a possibility too.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Will it work for Africa or is there too much corruption
| there?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Corruption, people are less educated, possibly more prone
| to violence etc. Still, I believe it will lead to a more
| developed economy than they have right now.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I'm also not sure what's the problem. We've been doing
| globalization for decades and it sounds like they pay market
| rate for office jobs where not many (office) jobs exist.
| Manufacturing has been much worse of a work environment and we
| seem to have gotten over that collectively
| mxkopy wrote:
| Don't you think it's kind of crazy that we are on the brink of
| understanding some fundamental things about cognition and what
| we seem to be most interested in are hotel bookings and product
| recommendations?
|
| Pity or what have you aside this is a massive L no matter how
| you take it
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| The things we think we'll learn about cognition will only
| benefit a few people. Rhe rest of us still have to live our
| lives, if we can, pretty much the same as we always have.
| infecto wrote:
| Sounds like a decent wage for that part of the world. Looks like
| on the medium-high end folks are making $600 a month there. Not
| sure how many hours worked but conservatively towards the high
| end that works out to $3-4 an hour.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What does $600/mo afford people over there that they can't get
| with $300/mo, $150/mo, $75/mo, etc?
| alephnerd wrote:
| The average monthly HOUSEHOLD income in Kenya is ~$160/mo and
| ~$250/mo in Nairobi [0]. Uganda is even poorer than Kenya.
|
| $1 per hour is around market rate for this kind of a role (some
| kind of college education).
|
| This kind of BPO work is how Kenya (and Uganda - they're using
| the same model) graduate up the services ladder.
|
| Edit: these are employees in a Tier 4 city in Uganda. $200/mo is
| a great salary in a rural town like Gulu.
|
| [0] - https://reall.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/12/Understanding-H...
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| The 1st two paragraphs of the article are brutal. A surreal way
| to start a narrative. Is that even real ? Sounds like it belongs
| in a movie script.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's an excerpt from a book. A lot of Guardian "articles" are
| just excerpts like this or op-eds.
|
| They know their market.
| j45 wrote:
| It's real.
|
| Maybe it's surreal in part because it's so far removed from the
| end users receiving the benefits.
| exabrial wrote:
| Why not just pay Unionized American Workers?
| kelnos wrote:
| Tired of the "shock" headlines like this: a dollar an hour isn't
| good or bad unless you know the context and local cost of living.
| Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world?
|
| The actually objectionable bit is that these jobs traumatize
| people over time, and desensitize them to the disturbing content
| they watch as a part of the job. Would I choose this over
| spending my day out in the heat, trying to sell food, snacks, or
| other wares, subject to the risk of pedestrian accidents or
| violent theft? Maybe?
|
| Ideally there could just be better jobs available all around, but
| some people who live there might consider this at least somewhat
| better than some of the alternative jobs they'd otherwise be
| working.
|
| Our current way of building models requires a large training data
| set that is already tagged/classified by humans. Unless the
| technology somehow improves so this is no longer necessary, these
| jobs are necessary. One bright spot is that once these models are
| trained, then humans can be out of the loop, which is certainly
| better than not having the models at all, and having to employ
| people, in perpetuity, to watch all of this content and directly
| make moderation decisions.
|
| But perhaps the question we should be asking is: should we just
| completely do without, and never subject people to these kinds of
| jobs, no matter what the purpose? Maybe video, photo, etc.
| sharing on this scale just shouldn't exist if we have to put
| humans through miserable work in order to do moderation. But I
| don't really see this changing. So if we continue to employ
| people to train our AI models, can we get to a point where our
| future models can be used to bootstrap/train more sophisticated
| models, without the need for further human classification of the
| training data?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| If we did without and these jobs went away, those people would
| be worse off. So no.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a
| developing economy. If labor is abundant and capital is scarce,
| what you _don 't_ want are capital-intensive jobs (e.g.
| semiconductor fab operator) even if the wage is 100x higher. Once
| everyone is employed, the bidding will begin and wages will rise.
| [1]
|
| Training AI is also way better than undermining Western
| democracy... [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model
|
| [2]
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I find it a bit odd how this article conflates content moderation
| for social network with AI training. Of course there is a
| relationship there but these are not the same thing. The article
| gives lots of examples of trauma caused by content moderation and
| then blames it on the needs of AI. If anything, if we could
| satisfactorily train an AI for content moderation then humans
| wouldn't need to be in the loop (as much) so it's a weird thing
| to just put these ideas together like that, and is clearly just
| trying to feed the current zeitgeist of "AI bad".
| j45 wrote:
| Is it odd?
|
| AI being trained for content moderation for social media...
|
| Social media seems to be downstream from training AI to
| recognize and categorize content.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| I worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several
| companies so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a
| bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths
|
| - Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue.
| You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly
| $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is
| personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If
| you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the
| other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited
| empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs -
| what you see in queues is not that different from what police see
| day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago.
|
| - Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year
| old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your
| sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also
| burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was
| with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those
| queues for years.
|
| - From the article you will notice that Africans worked on
| African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even
| imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-
| countries content. They rated their fellow Africans.
|
| - Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable
| coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not
| great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they
| find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India
| does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall
| it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-06 23:00 UTC)