Digital Labor Day, part 2
A personal story and more thoughts on how the human intelligence of data workers is disrespected
Thanks to all for your support on my “Digital Labor Day” post. Here’s a personal followup story with some further thoughts on the lack of respect in the AI business for the intelligence of human data workers.
Near the end of my senior year in high school, I won the top nation-wide founder's scholarship from my dad’s steel mill company. (Only mill employees were eligible.) I was the first person from our town to ever win the founder’s scholarship in the company’s decades-long history. (I was also the first winner who didn’t use male pronouns. ‘His’ was immutably preprinted in the text of my oversized, framed scholarship certificate.) So my scholarship win was big news, announced just below the fold on the front page of the local paper.
Dad drove me to the company award ceremony early on a Friday night, ahead of the rest of the family, for my photo ops with the company brass. Riding in his pickup truck on the way there, he confided that he got compliments at work that day from higher-ups who heard about my scholarship. He even got begrudging comments from people in his unit that maybe he was smarter than they had thought, since his kid was so smart. My dad said he was hopeful that for the first time — after 25 years — his boss might actually listen to some of his ideas on electrical maintenance the following week.
I remember vividly that it was so cool to realize that he might benefit too from me winning the scholarship. Dad taught me to read when I was 5, and was always finding creative and inexpensive ways to get me more books. He let me watch and help him work in the garage to develop my mechanical aptitude — not common there and back then for girls. It seemed like small payback that I might help him gain some respect for his own brain.
It never happened. He died on Monday morning 💔. Before going to work and meeting with his boss.
And, along with the huge losses this brought to our family, the ideas from his 25 years of steel mill experience died with him.
Yes, this really happened. No, AI didn’t write a word of it. But I understand the skepticism. If it hadn't happened to me, I might wonder if a creative writer was making this up or exaggerating. I have old newspaper clippings somewhere that prove it: a news article about his untimely death made the front page too.
My mom and dad were both high school graduates (no college). My dad’s parents were proud that all 9 kids finished high school; my grandpa only completed 6th grade. Neither of my mom’s parents went to college, and what little money the family had went towards sending her younger brothers to college (not her).
In life, I’ve often witnessed bias against folks like my dad without degrees, people who do physical work, and people who don’t complete high school or who get their GEDs. When I was applying for jobs before my college graduation, I learned that in my dad’s steel mill, most management roles required a college education.
During my decades of work in industrial software, I’ve seen so much bias against people who don’t have college degrees or elite backgrounds. For my dad, being one of those poor kids from “the island” area downtown meant that earning respect on the job was harder for him from day 1.
One of the best software architects I’ve known did not have a college degree; he was self-taught. He struggled to get job interviews even when times were good. Most software architecture roles required at least a BS degree, so he often got blocked from even applying.
As a hiring manager and director, I often faced resistance from HR and higher-ups about wanting to hire permanent staff without degrees, from non-elite schools, or with lower GPAs. (I’ve even known people with PhDs who openly discounted well-educated people who didn’t have a PhD too. Thankfully, I’ve also known some PhDs who don’t do this, so it’s not universal.)
Aside from the peculiar cachet of unicorn founders who are Ivy League dropouts, these biases are one dimension of human nature that I suspect will always be an uphill battle. If OpenAI actually builds traction on their AI certificate programs being enough for job seekers to land AI jobs (and what jobs won’t involve AI in the near future?), it might move the needle on education bias a bit.
I’m not optimistic that we’ll be able to get data workers the credit they deserve for the intelligence they contribute to our AI ecosystem, though. Even for data workers who do have degrees, other biases often kick in.
Still, we owe it to them to try, and to credit them when and where we can. We as a society cannot afford to lose out on the ideas and intelligence of the people we’re undervaluing. And we can at least damn well support humane working conditions and fair compensation for data workers.
To learn more about data labeling work, and why it’s currently an ethical concern for how many AI companies do business, see AI Ethics: Beyond Not Stealing Data and chapter “Concern 3: Exploitation of Data Workers” in my new book, Everyday Ethical AI: A Guide For Families & Small Businesses.
Our consciences should not allow this exploitation to linger for decades, like it did for the steel workers of old. It needs to stop now.
What can we do? We can ask questions about how data labeling is done for the AI tools we use, and leverage the power of our wallets and purses.
We can avoid LLM tools from companies that are known to have mistreated their data labelers, e.g. Meta/Facebook, anyone who outsources to Scale (OpenAI and others)
We can use only AI tools that were ethically sourced (suggestions: Swiss LLM Apertus chat.publicai.co or French open source LLM Mistral.ai).
For more suggestions on ways to actively support getting the ethical AI tools we all deserve to have at our disposal, see section “Five Things We Can All Do” in Everyday Ethical AI.
Thank you for sharing your story Karen, and sharing your dad with us. I want to see AI give people like your dad opportunities that the current setup of our society isn’t built to provide (yet?). I want to see all of us make it happen. And I can already see how the work you are doing here is doing that. I’m glad this beautiful post made its way out of your drafts and to us.
What an incredible story Karen! How sad to loose your dad in that way, but how fortunate to have had that deep conversation with him before he was gone.
I think he would be incredibly proud of what you are doing for women in AI right now.