Factual Dispatch #32: Three Mechanical Turks In A Trenchcoat

AI has ostensibly invaded all facets of the digital economy, and with it, comes big data, neural networks, machine learning, and a plurality of terms your eyes are already glazing over at. These words conjure up imaginings of dense banks of computers and servers, clicking away, solving the world’s problems. But…what if it was just a bunch of extra mans? What if all of the analysis and fabulous tech was just heads in a room?

Facebook recently admitted that AI based transcription of Messenger logs were being transcribed by humans, Amazon disclosed that workers are listening to Alexa commands and voice notes, and Google + Apple previously used human review for Siri & Google Assistant commands, but claim they will no longer do so going forward. Even Xbox Live & Cortana use human listeners to “improve the service” over time. Why does this matter? Because instead of pristine servers, chunking through data, machines making our lives better, the job of moderation, transcription, bargain bin coding, and other mundane tasks frequently falls to underpaid, workers in economically depressed areas of the planet.

As you can imagine, these workers don’t have the rights or protections the company’s full time staff enjoy, with wage theft, depression, and even trauma, especially when reviewing suicide-adjacent content. It’s hard to watch morbid, brutal, violent, or shocking content for six to eight hours a day, and the pay in no way compensates some of these workers for what they’re coping with. A few companies have realized how pervasive this problem is, and are working to produce “fair trade data,” which generates better/non-sweatshop working conditions for data workers around the world. But this is extremely slow going. Big Tech has declared AI to be the answer every problem from suicide and mass shootings to racism and shitposting. But every one of these solutions requires thousands, if not tens of thousands of real human minds reviewing edge cases and entering data. If we’re forcing them to stand in front of a bilge firehose every day, we should be real about how taxing that actually is.

Eye Watering Data Visualization of the Week: Semi-depressing visualization of electricity consumption related climate effects for everywhere we can get data.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Rural China has over 100 “tobacco schools” named for cigarette brands, funded by Chinese state-owned companies. Also, your mind makes fake news real. From the study published in Psychological Science:

Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: We can’t talk about inequality in the workplace until we stop ignoring how much we actively punish women who get pregnant.

“Huh, Interesting” Read of the Week: Neil Gaiman penned the English Dub of Princess Mononoke, but only after being convinced to do so by Quentin Tarantino.

Good News of the Week: Even the biggest of Trump’s tantrums can’t stop progress, some of the biggest coal plants in the country may not survive the winter.

Royal Sampler

FiveThirtyEight has a personality test based on the Big 5 personality traits, which makes it actually based on psychology, not fortune telling, to take and share with friends.

Ask the Gen Z’s in your office or your teens what a “stan” account is, and to understand what running those can be like, i-D has you covered.

A tanker that “disappeared” on June 5th showed back up on July 18 under a different name, a tactic illustrating the continued fight to circumvent US sanctions against Iran.

Have you seen the “I don’t brake for political correctness” or “I hang drywall and take no shit” shirts at Home Depot or on the Boardwalk this summer? How we got here.

One of the largest component and assembly vendors to the automotive industry is moving to electric. The pain of the internal combustion engine apocalypse is just starting.

Do you like electronic music? Do the genre names make no sense to you? This guide, almost 20 years in the making, is for you.

Marvel told the author of Maus, Art Spiegelman, that referring to Trump as “Orange Skull” was too political to be in the introduction to a volume he was writing. So he withdrew his draft and published this instead.

Dunk of the Week: Denmark’s reply to Trump’s call to buy Greenland is perfect.

For the next two weeks, Factual Dispatch will shift into Beach Reading mode, giving you a selection of long-form and deep dive readings for you to soak up while off. You are planning to take some time off aren’t you?

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