Abraham Evensen Tena Sketchblog

The term AI implies a sort of intelligence that can process raw sensory data and produce/assign meaning independently. This was the goal of the so-called Good Old Fashion Artificial Intelligence back in the 70 and 80s, but it was proven to be extremely difficult (and some say impossible). What is now being sold s AI is, instead, the result of deeply exploitative labor for many, and surveillance capitalism for all. "Content Moderators" in the global south have been made to manually interpret millions of images and texts, in effect bypassing the hard technical challenge of symbol-grounding (aka turning 0 and 1s into usueufl things). It is not unlike the mining of ore or natural resources, but this time, the deprecated labor of millions is being used to build homunculi that will replace service workers in the North. I find it deeply disturbing that these companies use scifi-based doomsday scenarios as a marketing strategy ("our tool is so powerful it could destroy the earth!"), given that doomsday already happened, and continues, for millions of colonized peoples around the world. This is a labor struggle in all fronts, which the African Content Moderators have made it clear by unionizing like they have.