Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor

Grooming data for the machines has a human cost. The Verge reports that startup Vainu is using prisoners in Finland to tag Finnish-language articles. The company uses Mechanical Turk to do this for other languages, but Finnish-speaking turks are hard to come by. So they get (and pay) prison inmates to do it.

There are legit concerns of exploiting prisoners for low-wage labor, but perhaps a broader concern is that this hints at a bleak future of work in the age of the algorithm. Indeed this “future” is already here for a growing segment of humans���with Mechanical-Turk-level labor turns out to be, literally, prison labor.

This type of job tends to be ���rote, menial, and repetitive,���
says Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information science
at the University of California at Los Angeles who
studies information workers. It does not require building
high level of skill, and if a university researcher
tried to partner with prison laborers in the same way,
���that would not pass an ethics review board for a study.���
While it���s good that the prisoners are being paid a
similar wage as on Mechanical Turk, Roberts points
out that wages on Mechanical Turk are extremely low
anyway. One recent research paper found that workers
made a median wage of $2 an hour.

As we design the future of technology, we also design the future of work. What might we do to improve the quality and pay of labor required to make automated systems work?

The Verge | Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor