How Silicon Valley’s successes are fueled by an underclass of ‘ghost workers’
“Ghost work” is anthropologist Mary L. Gray’s term for the invisible labor that powers our technology platforms. When Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, first arrived at the company, she learned that building artificial intelligence requires people to manage and clean up data to feed to the training algorithms. “I basically started asking the engineers and computer scientists around me, ‘Who are the people you pay to do this task work of labeling images and classification tasks and cleaning up databases?’” says Gray. Some people said they didn’t know. Others said they didn’t want to know and were concerned that if they looked too closely they might find unsavory working conditions.
So Gray decided to find out for herself....