Have you ever heard of ghost workers?
This is how it is called in slang: “ghost workers“, because they are people that nobody sees and only the work they do is “seen” by entering data into the computer. And what they do are jobs that computers can’t do on their own.
It is the cheap labor of Artificial Intelligence, since these people are the ones who “feed” the systems with the contribution of a lot of data so that these systems are capable of learning and generating information that may be useful to us. Without good data, they can’t get good information.
These workers are not the analysts or those who generate the programs, they are the ones who only enter data into the systems. And that can be done, and is done, from anywhere in the world, and companies look for the parts of the world that have the cheapest costs. In general third world countries.
Specialized companies have been created that hire this type of work such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Samasource and others that are platforms where these jobs are offered and people sign up to get them.
They work as a kind of auction to the bottom, the job is obtained by the one who requests the least money for it, and in this way the companies are able to lower their prices to the maximum because in a poor and distant country a few dollars can mean some money.
Today there are thousands of people working in this way and for two hours of work they can charge around 5 dollars, depending on the work to be done. These are prices that are well below what is paid in the Western world, and it is Western technology companies that get them to work for them at low costs and without hiring staff.
From the point of view of the companies, a better business is impossible. They only need to have a computer platform in which some companies request that they do some work and others do it and they dispute it by lowering prices.
They are things of what some call the “gig economy” and that in my opinion is a way of exploitation of people with the use of current technologies.
Who said that slavery had disappeared 200 years ago?
