Lesser Gods

Labor in the AI Labyrinth
Will AI steal your job, or transform it into something worse? This book reveals the hidden human labor and conflict embedded "in the loop" of today's machine learning models.
Conventional accounts of AI tell a story in which fully automated systems steal the products of intellectual labor and then "replace" the creators. But these accounts fail to ask what kinds of labor are used in the creation of the models themselves. This book unveils AI's hidden abode of production, with a focus on its most labor-intensive segments.

Neel breaks open the black box of the machine learning model to shine light on both its technical characteristics and the role played by human labor in its production. He details the basic architecture of large language models while also tracing out a social history of "microwork" and associated forms of gig labor in the digital economy. He shows how a series of economic crises supplied the cheap labor that made the AI boom possible in the first place, triggering new forms of worker organizing.

Expanding this picture, Neel elucidates the physical infrastructures required to produce these models, the trends in education and employment that have supported the sector's growth, and the strange nature of work on the "model assembly line."

Finally, Neel turns to larger questions of the industry's role in corporate power and statecraft, as viewed through the changing structure of the US military-industrial complex. Here he traces out the role the imperial project has played in the development of the machine learning industry and explores the emergence of a "technofascist" cluster of Silicon Valley companies whose operations promise dire consequences both in the US and around the world.

Only by detailing what the mass production of machine learning systems entails can we understand how AI might reshape the struggle for a better world.

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