The aff intensifies exploitation of the global south.

At an expo dedicated to big data and AI in London, IBM argued that AI ‘takes the machine out of the human’. 25 Rather than fears of replacing humans by machines, tech companies reproduce imaginaries of human creativity and authenticity liberated from machinic-like labour. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora have argued that these imaginaries of machine labour reproduce AI as a ‘surrogate’ technology, a lesser human. 26 These ‘surrogate’ technologies do not in fact replace the repetitive labour that some humans are called to do, but they are intensifying the repetitive and machine-like labour which has come to be known as ‘microwork’. AI relies on globally dispersed, unpaid or underpaid labour of data cleaning, categorising and featurising. ‘But in reality’, Phil Jones reminds us, ‘the magic of machine learning is the grind of data labelling’. 27 There is no AI without training data, and as training and testing datasets become increasingly massive, they need to be cleaned, curated and improved. This work is done by millions of microworkers, mostly in the Global South. As geographers Mark Graham and Mohamed Amir Anwar have shown, given ‘the geographically untethered nature of digital tasks, workers from different parts of the world can potentially compete, thus creating a planetary market for digital labour’. 28 Rather than seeing AI as a high-tech autonomous weapons system that is a killer robot, or an automated facial recognition system – i.e. as a coherent ‘thing’ Suchman cautioned against – AI is a distributed socio-technical system that is always already produced, circulated, maintained and repaired through dispersed, intensive and underpaid labour.