Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.
After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training.” Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.
In US towns and cities, Flock cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies form centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan for car license plates, as well as pedestrians, who are categorized based on their clothing, and possibly by factors like gender and race.
In a growing number of cases, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveil minority communities.
It isn’t clear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the documents for data annotators showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.
Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have resorted to low-paid international labor to bring their product to market. Amazon’s cashier-free “just walk out” stores, for example, were really just gig workers watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza,” was found out to be selling passing human-written code as AI generated.
The difference with those examples is that those services were voluntary — powered by the exploitation of workers in the global south, yes, but with a choice to opt out on the front-end. That isn’t the case with Flock, as you don’t have to consent to end up in the panopticon. In other words, for a growing number of Americans, a for-profit company is deciding who gets watched, and who does the watching — a system built on exploitation at either end.
I mean, there is actual “AI” tech that exists, and isn’t just people working in sweatshops, like this: https://deeplabcut.github.io/DeepLabCut/README.html
It’s just kind of difficult to get consistency between trials, and reliability seems to boil down to completely eliminating variability. So kind of useless outside of a lab setting (as is).
I tend to feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth and too unreliable (as is) to usually bother with it, but I know people who are just fellow lab rats (not broligarchs) and are super devoted to getting AI to work for their projects. Like most sectors in this country, even science is being forced to embrace AI. Regardless of if it actually makes sense for your line of work or not, the expectation is get it working or face the chopping block, and there are definitely people who are trying their hardest to really get this shit off the ground (because the alternative is be prepared to be out of a job for being obsolete).
This is also why it’s kind of surprising to learn that even “AI” that’s simply comparing license plates from one camera to the next, is actually just due to human slave labor.
So, do any of the broligarchs receiving these huge contracts actually believe that eventually they’ll get AI to work once enough data and money is dumped into it and the little people at the bottom figure out all the kinks for them?
Or is it just that everybody at the top acknowledges this is a dead end, but once you’re in the secret club at the top of the food chain, and you’re making ridiculous amounts of money, your incentive is just to keep your mouth shut, keep making money, and fuck the consequences because once society collapses you’ll get to be kings of your own little monarchs anyway?
If it is the second, and nobody at the top really believes AI is going anywhere, then what are all the giant, energy sucking data centers that are being built across the country actually for?
You thing too big. IA is already used and work well in tool like n8n. Where you use it to write 3-5 lines of code to fill a function box. Still have to think to coordinates actions but the coding is mostly done by IA.
But if the broligarchs don’t actually expect to ever get any of this “AI” shit actually working, then what is the end game?
Obviously the majority of people are only in it to make quick money, but what about the psychos at the very top who are directing policy and building these giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers?
If Thiel/Musk/Zuckerberg don’t actually have the expectation that “AI” will eventually work itself out, then it won’t matter how money the rich (but not broligarch rich) Wall Street bros and bankers dumped into the “AI” boom.
It won’t be like the .com boom and the Internet, because it doesn’t actually exist. If the economy completely collapses, and dollar becomes worthless currency, the “money” the average rich asshole hoards away after investing in the 2025 “AI” boom, will have about as much value as monopoly money.
Meanwhile the fucking Bond villain billionaires like Thiel (who have been dreaming of this exact scenario for over 20 years) hold all resources (including a recently purchased uranium mine).
So, “hypothetically,” if that was Thiel’s endgame, and the “AI” jig is up, then they no longer have to pretend they’re trying to develop artificial intelligence or AGI. But they do already hold control of most resources, have mass surveillance capabilities, and each broligarch owns one or more of these giant supercomputers/data centers that have been built in cities all over the
U.S.world and soon in outer space.In this totally fictional scenario, once the dollar collapses (likely followed by all of society collapsing along with it), what do the broligarchs actually use their giant nuclear powered “AI” data centers for?
AI or no AI, they’re currently being built all over the country, so what is their actual purpose?
That close to the world of the série alien ! Yeah I love this série. But yeah I expect world to turn this way without the aliens maybe.
It allow not too dumb middle managers to develop more than they would have without but it is too expensive for what it output I join you on this. Buy the thing is still mind blowing, by doing statistics really fast you output something which is relatively close to human. At least far more than what humanity built before, but hey we only got one planet… Maybe exporting all this shit in space or on mar like they wanted. But that optimostic