The Ghost Workers Powering The AI Economy

Rightly or wrongly, the AI-driven world has come to typify the woes of modern economic life, as tech giants such as Facebook and Alphabet amass vast fortunes, due in large part to the huge quantities of data that users often freely provide them. Accusations of economic imbalance tend to be multi-faceted. Not only do these companies typically employ fewer people than the industrial titans of yore, but they also attract the ire of officials over their tax practices and have grown insanely rich off the back of something users receive no compensation for. It's helped to create a world in which the haves are increasingly well off, while the have nots make do with insecure and poorly paid work. Nowhere is this exchange more evident than in the data annotation industry, where people from around the world help to prepare and tidy up the data used by the tech giants to train the algorithms upon which their fortunes increasingly rest.