One chapter of the book describes AI as a labour-intensive system which concentrates value in Silicon Valley and imposes its cultural categories.
This social science text proposes to read micro-work platforms as the infrastructure of a "extractivism" specific to contemporary AI. Based on studies of digital work, Latin American critical thinking and a mixed survey of data workers in Venezuela and Colombia, the author describes how data production, cleaning, annotation and maintenance are based on precarious work, while value is concentrated in a few poles such as Silicon Valley.
Categories presented as universal
The chapter also points out that the annotation instructions impose culturally located categories, largely American, as if they were self-evident, which the author attaches to hierarchies inherited from colonization. Finally, it stresses what makes these workers available: unpaid domestic work, community networks, local material conditions. AI appears to be less an immaterial technology than an economic system anchored in territories.
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