US dystopia

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The latest Federal Reserve survey has shockingly found that four in 10 American adults would find themselves in a bit of trouble if they had to cover an unexpected expense of only $400, either with cash, savings or a credit card charge that could be quickly paid off.

A Mentality Problem? Many Americans Can’t Afford An Extra $400 Expense | SafeHaven.com

The artificial-intelligence industry runs on the invisible labor of humans working in isolated and often terrible conditions—and the model is spreading to more and more businesses. On Wednesday, the Guardian published an article about the realities of producing Google Assistant. Behind the “magic” of its ability to interpret 26 languages is a huge team of linguists, working as subcontractors, who must tediously label the training data for it to work. They earn low wages and are routinely forced to work unpaid overtime. Their concerns over working conditions have been repeatedly dismissed. It’s just one story among dozens that have begun to peel back the curtain on how the artificial-intelligence industry operates. Human workers don’t just label the data that makes AI work. Sometimes humans workers are the artificial intelligence. Behind Facebook’s content-moderating AI are thousands of content moderators; behind Amazon Alexa is a global team of transcribers; and behind Google Duplex are sometimes very human callers mimicking the AI that mimics humans. Artificial intelligence doesn’t run on magic pixie dust. It runs on invisible laborers who train algorithms relentlessly until they’ve automated their own jobs away.

The AI gig economy is coming for you - MIT Technology Review

It’s quite true that huge numbers of jobs have fled to China, but who is responsible for that? China? Is China holding a gun to the heads of Apple, GM, IBM, GE … and forcing them to ship jobs to China? One can’t even say that it’s the fault of the managers of the corporations. Their responsibility, in fact legal obligation, is to make profits for shareholders, and that purpose is served by shifting jobs to China, Mexico, Vietnam, Bangladesh….

Noam Chomsky: Trump's "Economic Boom" Is a Sham

Gallup polls regularly measure stress, worry and anger. The U.S. ranks high by these measures, reaching new highs in 2018, by now even higher than during the great recession. In reported stress levels, the U.S. has “one of the highest rates out of the 143 countries studied and it beat the global average (35 percent) by a full 20 percentage points.” The U.S. is even above Venezuela in its current distress.

The dire emotional state of Americans is illustrated dramatically by the “deaths of despair” (death by suicide, drugs and alcohol) documented by Anne Case and Angus Deaton among working-class whites; tellingly, those “who would have entered the market starting in the early 1980s,” when the neoliberal assault took off. The deaths of despair are estimated at 150,000 a year, contributing to the decline in life expectancy in the U.S. for the past two years, the first time since World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic — a phenomenon unprecedented in developed societies..

Noam Chomsky: Trump's "Economic Boom" Is a Sham