AI Spots Slave Sites from the Sky

An intriguing article in New Scientist offers a look at how artificial intelligence is being deployed to help the modern anti-slavery movement:

Online volunteers are helping to track slavery from space. A new crowdsourcing project aims to identify South Asian brick kilns – frequently the site of forced labour – in satellite images.

This data will then be used to train machine learning algorithms to automatically recognise brick kilns in satellite imagery. If computers can pinpoint the location of possible slavery sites, then the coordinates could be passed to local non-governmental organisations to investigate, says Kevin Bales, who is leading the project at the University of Nottingham in the UK. […]

No one is quite sure how many kilns there are in the so called “Brick Belt” that stretches across parts of Pakistan, India and Nepal. Some estimates put the figure at 20,000, but it may be as high as 50,000.

Bales is hoping that his machine learning approach will produce a more accurate number and help organisations on the ground know where to direct their anti-slavery efforts.

The application is not just limited to brick kilns in South Asia. Bales and his researchers also plan to use AI to locate open pit mines in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And a similar project is using image recognition technology to geo-locate hotel rooms used for sex trafficking. If refined and expanded, those efforts could lead to a more thorough and accurate mapping of forced labor sites around the world.

On shouldn’t necessarily jump on the techno-utopian bandwagon just yet; modern slave-holders and traffickers may well develop similar technology to obscure their trail. But given how much of the AI discourse is dominated by dystopian scenarios and predictions of economic catastrophe for the world’s poor, here is a refreshing reminder of the opposite effect—and a promising example of how AI could advance the cause of human liberty for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

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