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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is neither “artificial” nor “intelligent.” AI, and the tools as well as production of the virtual world, are made of real-world, three-dimensional resources: the raw material of Earth. Kate Crawford (2021) makes it clear that AI is “an extractive industry,” based on “highly energy-intensive infrastructures,” from the production and labor to the surveillance measures of corporate and governmental actors, aimed at total social control: “our sense of the cloud being out of sight and abstracted away, when in fact it is material, affecting the environment and climate in ways that are far from being fully recognized and accounted for.” In our minds, the digital space is immaterial. However, for example, Crawford notes that “Data centers are among the world’s largest consumers of electricity.” She continues, “Thousands of people are needed to support the illusion of automation: tagging, correcting, evaluating, and editing AI systems to make them appear seamless.” Illusions regarding automation and AI provoke fantasies of a progressively liberal, democratic, and safe future based on the will to virtualization. Public relations campaigns have manufactured this utopian vision. What has been disguised is the maltreatment of labor within the supply chains of high-tech production. A case in point is the relationship between Foxconn and Apple. The Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, assembles iPhones, iPads, Macs, etc. for the largest and most profitable corporation in the world: Apple. Foxconn has one million workers. The labor practices and management systems of these factories for technological supply chains reads draconian. Specifically, in 2010, a dozen factory workers committed suicide based on the horrendous work conditions. The political suicides were largely completed by the individuals throwing themselves off upper levels of dormitory buildings they resided in. The working conditions of Foxconn and the stories of individual laborers is documented in the book, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers. What has been learned is that “our beloved high-tech gadgets are not produced in a Silicon Valley paradise. Indeed, while designed in Silicon Valley, they are not produced there at all.”
References:
- 45 and 219, Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 195, Chan, J., Selden, M. and Ngai, P. (2020). Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the lives of China’s workers. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.
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