Cory Doctorow: Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: “AI stands for ‘absent Indian.’”
Sometimes the remote workers aren’t low-paid—they’re engineers making a lot of money and replacing low-wage workers. That works too; the scam allows technology companies to boost their stock prices while failing to deliver on their promises, Cory says.
Journalists and other critics who attack tech companies for stealing jobs aren’t doing the companies any harm. They’re supporting the companies’ inflated claims and elevating stock prices.