James Muldoon is a reader in management at the University of Essex, Mark Graham a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and Callum Cant a senior lecturer at the University of Essex business school. They work together at Fairwork, a project that appraises the working conditions in digital workplaces, and they are co-authors of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI. Why did you write the book? James Muldoon: The idea for the book emerged out of field work we did in Kenya and Uganda on the data annotation industry. We spoke to a number of data annotators, and the working conditions were just horrendous.

Artificial intelligence is often associated with prophecies of job destruction. Yet an army of workers in the global south is being pressed into action. In discussions about the locations comprising the key productive nodes of artificial intelligence and other next-generation digital technologies, African workers rarely get a mention. Autonomous vehicles, machine-learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems--how many of these technologies are'made in Africa'? The answer, actually, is'all of them'.