The girl likes to tune in 60 Minutes on Sunday night. She doesn’t mind my editorial content.
Or she’s too nice to say anything.
Last Sunday there was a piece on how big tech is making virtual slaves out of Kenyans by making them train AI. The segment was hosted by the animated corpse of Leslie Stahl. I had no idea the old broad was still alive. She’s over 80 years old. When does she stop bolting on her concerned face to record video?
Back to the Kenyans teaching AI.
What they are doing is looking at images and labeling what’s in them for the AI machine. It’s boring tedious work, nearly as bad as a cobalt mine, we’re told. For this, they are paid the equivalent of $1.50 an hour from the likes of FaceSpace and OpenAI. Oh…the humanity! The poor saps have mathematics degrees and have to do grunt work. I wonder if that’s their equivalent to having to work at Starbucks?
They appear to be content monitoring as well, as one of them said his sex life has suffered from watching pron all day. I wasn’t aware AI needed a play by play for that. I can see that getting old.
Ok. It’s a miserable job. The folks in the US get issues from the content they have to view as well. And make no mistake, I’m certain there are some of the wretched doing that job in this country.
But my spider sense started tingling. Mostly because I know all these idiots do is stir shit, and that plastic granny is one of the worst.
Back in the day, The same types (20/20 I think) showed that if you rolled an older pickup (they used a ’65 Chebbie) gas would dribble out of the filler neck from the tank behind the seat. They lost me at the rollover. I had a ’64 and a ’63. They clock in at like 2.5 tons and don’t ride as high as pickups today. So you have to be doing something incredibly stupid to get it on it’s side. They had to run it at ramming speed at a single ramp at speed to get it to flip. Hardly a real-life example. Then, when the tanks were put on the side, they claimed they blow up when hit. They don’t. Theirs didn’t. They got busted for using dynamite because it wouldn’t explode.
Back to the Africans.
I wondered (out loud) what the average wage was compared to the cost of living. The locals with the sob stories looked well dressed, well fed. One they showed walking was sporting a new pair of spotless white sneakers, not unlike the indigenous population in Dallas.
Whelp. Turns out, $1.50/hour translates to roughly 196 Kenyan shillings. The average salary is 253m or roughly $1.95/hour.
Well. Looky here:
You know who also averages 196 shillings/hour ($1.50)?
Data entry clerks.
What are these AI geniuses doing?
Data Entry.
Granny Leslie also stumbled on a cold hard fact of IT: You aren’t going to have your 6 figure AI engineers doing monkey work, just like you aren’t going to have your automotive engineer detailing cars before they are delivered. In my experience, you aren’t going to have your network engineer or project manager install structured cabling. Same deal.
And thanks to US labor laws as well as EOE, IT firms contract grunt work out. In my case, a rather large US bank outsourced it’s IT to a consulting firm, who outsourced the ‘feet on the street’ to a company I worked for. We then used our own guys or contracted out further. Matter of fact, we used a temp agency. So we’d get manpower from a bottom feeder. If they worked out, and we had work for them, we’d put them on staff. If they didn’t, they were shown the door.
They were paid a fraction of what we were charging. Duh.
It’s a miserable gig for those guys, many of which don’t have much of an alternative. They most certainly didn’t during the tech blow up in 2003.
This is a dog bites man story.
You don’t see them moaning that data entry clerks in Dallas make $18-$20/hour. That would be slightly under the average US salary, just like the average salary in Kenya.
And even those a few years away from wearing Depends in a memory care unit should know better.
Inspected By Pat 