<story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;Even if the allegations of &amp;quot;traumatizing content&amp;quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&amp;#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&amp;#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattdeboard</author><text>Your critique of the article is sensible to a point. But your analysis is incomplete. I’m gonna lay out a few predicates hopefully we can all agree on as true, then get to my point.&lt;p&gt;First, hopefully you can agree that, fundamentally, the company paying these child workers is trading money for labor. (This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a fact of labor markets.)&lt;p&gt;Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.&lt;p&gt;Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.&lt;p&gt;Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action.&lt;p&gt;Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out &amp;amp; undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives.&lt;p&gt;With these predicates laid out, my point: The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.&lt;p&gt;The rawness of the deal only becomes apparent when we start to inspect why material conditions are such that this deal — trading an hour of labor for $2 to a company serving a multi-billion-dollar market — is enticing to &lt;i&gt;children&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;In other words, this article, in &lt;i&gt;my&lt;/i&gt; analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;Even if the allegations of &amp;quot;traumatizing content&amp;quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&amp;#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&amp;#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstarfish</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s the moral dilemma. In a just world, people wouldn&amp;#x27;t have to sell their bodies or break their minds in order to eat.&lt;p&gt;But we don&amp;#x27;t live in a just world, so until we do, denying them opportunities over &amp;quot;ethics&amp;quot; is condemning them to worse treatment elsewhere-- or starvation.&lt;p&gt;Hungry people don&amp;#x27;t care about the opinions of fat academics pontificating about Ethics.</text></comment>