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NEW FROM DAIR 📢 Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. 🧵 Based on in-depth interviews and direct organizing experience, "Drive Down" reveals how Amazon is using surveillance technologies to intensify driver workloads, instill a patchwork of uneven digital punishments and expose all drivers to potential wage theft and unsafe working conditions.

Today is the 12th anniversary of 369 Eritrean refugees who drowned in Lampedusa (Italy) exactly 12 years ago. As our researcher and refugee advocate Meron Estefanos wrote, one of them was 22 years old and was giving birth as she was drowning. Her body was later found with an umbilical cord attached to her baby. In this possible futures entry, @npub1zmkm...6wm0 imagines a future where the families of the disappeared find closure.

DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute)

Closure for Families of the Missing

Behind every name is a family torn apart, a void where a loved one should be.

“These are really big, scary problems that are complex & challenging to address — it’s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking & wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution. I think it’s the reason that so many people turn to cults & all sorts of really out there beliefs when the future feels scary & uncertain [...] this is not different than that. They just have billions of dollars to actually enact their ideas.” @npub19u84...pjzk , lead research engineer at the @npub1mmfh...2mx9

AP News

How Silicon Valley is using religious language to talk about AI

As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use to describe it is becoming in...

"“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

the Guardian

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent