There are 40 million people in slavery today. SDG 8.7 is a commitment to end modern slavery, with the ambition to reduce that number by 10,000 people every day. James Cockayne, Director, Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University, is confident that we are "nowhere near" that target. The reasons for this systemic and enduring failure are the result of the "mispricing" of labour, where true social costs are not quantified. Worse still, companies are rewarded for driving down their labour costs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for years on satellite images – so why all the excitement? The application of AI and machine learning (ML) to Earth observation (EO) data is a huge growth area, demonstrated by the many online competitions, GitHub repositories and entire businesses founded exclusively on this topic. GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way people work, from open source to business. Users can host and review code, manage projects and build software alongside 31 million developers. However, taking the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of AI as'systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence', AI has been available for many years to address the meatiest challenges in image interpretation.