Feeding The Machine - The hidden human labour powering ai

Big Tech has sold us the illusion that ai is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions that labour under often appalling conditions to make ai possible.

Over more than a decade, Mark Graham and his team have been investigating the intricate network of organisations that feed the ai machine, revealing uncomfortable, untold truths. Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork, his work shines a light into the darkest corners of the ai 'revolution'. It shows how ai is an extraction machine that churns through ever-larger datasets and feeds off humanity's labour and collective intelligence to power its algorithms. What can we do about it? Is a just digital future even possible?

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ABOUT The Speaker
mark Graham is an economic geographer and Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. Graham is also a Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, a Research Affiliate in the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, a Research Associate at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa at the University of Cape Town, a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at The New School.