When customers in the London borough of Hackney shop in the new Amazon Fresh store, they no longer pay a checkout operator but simply walk out with their goods. Amazon describes "just walk out shopping" as an effortless consumer experience. The rise of automated stores during the pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg. Floor-cleaning robots have been introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and schools. Fast-food restaurants are employing burger-grilling robots and chatbots.

A woman living in Kenya's Dadaab, which is among the world's largest refugee camps, wanders across the vast, dusty site to a central hut lined with computers. Like many others who have been brutally displaced and then warehoused at the margins of our global system, her days are spent toiling away for a new capitalist vanguard thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley. A day's work might include labelling videos, transcribing audio, or showing algorithms how to identify various photos of cats. Amid a drought of real employment, "clickwork" represents one of few formal options for Dadaab's residents, though the work is volatile, arduous, and, when waged, paid by the piece. Cramped and airless workspaces, festooned with a jumble of cables and loose wires, are the antithesis to the near-celestial campuses where the new masters of the universe reside.

Artificial intelligence will be one of the key drivers of the economic growth in the next few years. But what will drive the AI industry itself? Some consider AI technologies a secret weapon of a few high-paid engineers. In fact, the success of an AI solution is mainly defined by the low-paid workers in developing countries. By 2025, AI technologies and AI-driven services will become a nearly $60 billion market -- $59.75 billion in Tractica's view, an increase from less than $1.38 billion in 2016.