In recent months, there has been a steady stream of books published about Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. I tend not to select these books to feature, even though I consider the issue fascinating as well as one of the most contentious and controversial of our present moment. And in past editions of Nonfiction Views I have shared news about authors fighting against having their literary output fed without permission or compensation into the maw of computers ‘training’ A.I. to write.
But overall, it just seems the field is so new, so unpredictable, and evolving so rapidly that any book that tries to capture the substance of the story will fall short. There are paeans to the promise of A.I, and there are dire warnings of how it could bring our polity, our infrastructure and even our lives to a halt. And there are books that try to puzzle through both sides of the argument. But really, how can we know at this point? It’s like a publishing lottery: some author will be lucky enough to have been proven the most prescient as events unfold.
But one book coming out this week piqued my interest with it’s unusual angle on the story: Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., by Mark Graham, Callum Cant, and James Muldoon. There have been a number of recent articles how both A.I. and bitcoin mining are putting increasing stress on our power grid. As a recent article in Forbes notes:
The data centers used to train and operate these models require vast amounts of electricity. GPT-4, for example, required over 50 gigawatt-hours, approximately 0.02% of the electricity California generates in a year, and 50 times the amount it took to train GPT-3, the previous iteration. As AI proliferates across industries, this energy demand will only grow. When AI is used to optimize energy-intensive manufacturing, which will need experimentation and more data, this problem will grow further.
Data centers and their associated transmission networks have become a primary driver of global energy consumption. At present, this accounts for 3% of global consumption, emitting as much CO2 as Brazil. Increasing energy requirements show no sign of slowing down either, as consumption could grow from 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 to 1000 twh in 2026.
And now, this new book shows how there is not only a looming energy crisis keeping A.I. running, but there is also a global sweatshop that enables it to exist as well.
The book opens with a behind-the-scenes look at a problem many of us may have faced: having a Facebook post flagged for some breach of content rules. I’ve always considered this to be primarily a function of some poorly programmed A.I. algorithm, but it turns out there are indeed actual people involved:
Mercy craned forward, took a deep breath and loaded another task on her computer. One after another, disturbing images and videos appeared on her screen. As a Meta content moderator working at an outsourced office in Nairobi, Mercy was expected to action one ‘ticket’ every fifty-five seconds during her ten-hour shift. This particular video was of a fatal car crash. Someone had filmed the scene and uploaded it to Facebook, where it had been flagged by a user. Mercy’s job was to determine whether it had breached any of the company’s guidelines that prohibit particularly violent or graphic content.
These content moderators spend their long shifts constantly viewing videos, under pressure to both process a set numerical goal but also to accurately tag the content according to Meta’s guidelines. The videos range from bullying and harassment to violence, sexually explicit images, suicides, torture and rape. Imagine watching hundreds of these videos every day, in rapid succession, with no time to process your emotions. One content moderator explained: “Most of us are damaged psychologically, some have attempted suicide...some of our spouses have left us and we can’t get them back.” Workers who leave their desks, crying and shaking after seeing some particularly horrifying video, are told by their superiors that they had violating company policy by leaving their desk without properly coding in a bathroom break. They work for low pay on contracts lasting just a few months at a time, meaning they also lack job security. The offices can have a hundred desks lined up in rows in darkened rooms.
And that’s just one aspect of the global army of workers who are behind the social media apps, chatbots, A.I. content assistants and automated technologies that are ever-present in our lives. If you think your social media is a flood of bad content now, without these workers we would be completely flooded with violent and sexual images. There are people feeding content into systems to train machine learning algorithms, to know the difference between a traffic light and a street sign. ChatGPT-4 has some 1.76 trillion parameters and variables that drive its performance. That data doesn’t insert itself into the computers by itself.
Automobile technology provides another example, not just for self-driving cars, but also for many of the conveniences of modern cars, like the ability to sense the lines on the highway.
The company compiled a list of publicly available datasets and selected what it needed, then purchased private datasets with thousands of hours of footage annotated with labels from hundreds of object categories (traffic lights, pedestrians, other motorists, etc. After developing a model at its AI lab, machine learning engineers at the company realized that there were several edge cases (rare events or scenarios) for which they would need new data annotated to further train the model. Datasets consisting of cars driving in different conditions have to be manually annotated by thousands of annotators. The company engages three different annotation providers in the Philippines, Kenya and India to perform these tasks.
The authors estimate that 80% of the time spent training AI to ‘think’ consists of people viewing and annotating datasets. And who is doing this work? People like a young woman in Uganda, who spends long days for low pay watching hour after hour of footage of drivers at the wheel, annotating any sign of a lapse in concentration, which it used by tech companies to develop ‘in-cabin behavior monitoring’ systems intended to help drivers stay alert. Her work is monitored, and if her name turns red on a supervisor;s computer screen, it means she has dropped below her target and may have to work unpaid overtime to make it up. There are millions of people around the world doing this work.
The book is divided into several chapters, each covering one aspect of the global workforce behind the production of AI. The section on the annotators comes first, and I did find it the most riveting. The stories of their lives and work are amazing, and the authors also root this modern labor firmly within the history of colonialism and its exploitation of labor and resources. And while the workers today are monitored by computer software and punished if they fail to meet their goals, the authors trace that back into history as well, and the myriad ways the owners of slaves, plantations, mills and factories devised ways to monitor their laborers. They cite journalist Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat as optimistically believing that the internet would allow people around the globe, especially poor people, to take part in the global economy, and respond by saying his “fundamental mistake was to confuse equality of connection with equality of bargaining power.
Later chapters in the book put the spotlight on the sectors of the global AI workforce who hold more of that bargaining powers: the engineers, technicians, owners and investors. Each of these sections is also very interesting, but here the book travels over much of the broader implications of AI that are covered in the books I tend to pooh-pooh. Nevertheless, the ten years they spent investigating the global AI workforce gives them a sound basis to write about these deeper issues.
The chapter on engineers looks at the large language models (LLMs) that are the basis of search engines and chatbots. The authors show how the biases and limitations of the annotators can introduce flaws in the systems, but they also look at how biases and misinformation are introduced by the automated self-learning systems that sweep up billions of data points by crawling through the entire internet. As chatbots become more sophisticated through analyzing their billions of examples of how words relate to one another, they can give the impression that they are truly carrying on a conversation with you. The authors say this is a false impression, that the machines are incapable of understanding the social connections of words, only the definitions and grammars of them.
Many of the crazy results that have made the news in recent years are discussed, such as the the legal citations created out of thin air when lawyers asked AI for help in writing their legal presentations. More obscure examples pop up as well: one example of the gibberish sometimes produced by AI is ChatBot’s answer to the question “who is ‘TheNitromeFan’?” Chatbot’s answer was “182.” It is thought that this may have come from the LLM scraping the Reddit forum r/counting, which is devoted to counting to infinity. Usernames in the group appear over and over along with the number counting, perhaps leading to the LLM creating false associations between names and numbers. Other oddities, like a Microsoft Bing chatbot urging a New York Times journalist to leave his wife, have eluded even a potential explanation. From here, the authors go on to explore the serious dangers of false information and misinformation being generated and propagated.
Likewise, the chapter on the owners and operators delves into the environmental costs I mentioned at the beginning of this review. One of the many examples given is that in Ireland by 2028, data centers are forecast to use 27% of the country’s electricity output. These examples in turn lead to examining the not always aboveboard deal-making between giant global corporations and the governments of countries around the world.
In all, I found this a very informative and entertaining read.
THIS WEEK”S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- The Art of Power: My Story as America's First Woman Speaker of the House, by Nancy Pelosi. In The Art of Power, Pelosi describes for the first time what it takes to make history—not only as the first woman to ascend to the most powerful legislative role in our nation, but to pass laws that would save lives and livelihoods, from the emergency rescue of the economy in 2008 to transforming health care. She describes the perseverance, persuasion, and respect for her members that it took to succeed, but also the joy of seeing America change for the better. Among the best-prepared and hardest working Speakers in history, Pelosi worked to find common ground, or stand her ground, with presidents from Bush to Biden. She also shares moving moments with soldiers sent to the front lines, women who inspired her, and human rights activists who fought by her side. Pelosi took positions that established her as a prophetic voice on the major moral issues of the day, warning early about the dangers of the Iraq War and of the Chinese government’s long record of misbehavior. This moral courage prepared her for the arrival of Trump, with whom she famously tangled, becoming a red-coated symbol of resistance to his destructive presidency.
- Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, by David Daley. In 1981, a young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard law school, joined the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, taking up a cause that had been fomenting in Republican circles for over a decade by that point. From his perch inside the Reagan DOJ, this lawyer would attempt to bring down one of the defining pieces of 20th century legislation—the Voting Rights Act. His name was John Roberts.
Over thirty years later in 2013, these efforts by John Roberts and the conservative legal establishment culminated when Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote Shelby County vs. Holder, one of the most consequential decisions of modern jurisprudence. A dramatic move that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Roberts’s decision—dangerously premised on the flawed notion that racism was a thing of the past—emboldened right-wing, antidemocratic voting laws around the country immediately. No modern court decision has done more to hand elections to Republicans than Shelby. “David Daley has written a masterful true-crime story in which the victim is democracy. He reveals the schemers behind today’s assault on fair elections, some of whom sit on the Supreme Court. Antidemocratic is both riveting and essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of American democracy.” — Jane Mayer, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Money
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Trump in Exile, by Meridith McGraw. The Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, put a horrific closing note on a norm-shattering presidency, as the twice-impeached Donald Trump rode a wave of denial and resentment out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and crashed back at Mar-a-Lago—seemingly wounded, seemingly done. But he wasn’t. And what, exactly, was he building in there? Meridith McGraw vividly chronicles the incredible period of Trump’s exile in South Florida—a postpresidency like no other in American history—and brings us inside the gilded walls of his private club, where an alternate reality in which the 2020 election was stolen became Republican Party orthodoxy. How did the country go from Trump’s political banishment to his renewed dominance over his party, as he effortlessly destroyed the once-formidable Ron DeSantis and now stands on the verge of returning to the White House—all while facing the heavy shadow of multiple federal and state criminal indictments? The Mar-a-Lago period is essential for understanding Trump’s implausible resurgence and the many missed opportunities to stop him.
- The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, by Heath Hardage Lee, In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press.
Pat was a highly travelled First Lady, visiting eighty-three countries during her tenure. After a devastating earthquake in Peru in 1970, she personally flew in medical supplies and food to hard-hit areas, meeting one-on-one with victims of the tragedy. The First Lady’s 1972 trips with her husband to China and to Russia were critical to the detente that resulted. She was progressive on women’s issues, favoring the Equal Rights Amendment and backing a targeted effort to get more women into high level government jobs. Pat strongly supported nominating a woman for the Supreme Court. She was pro-choice, supporting women’s reproductive rights publicly even before the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973. "She was smarter than people knew, funnier than people expected and stronger than people gave her credit for. She was also a successful diplomat for her husband and contributed to his political success including her advancing of his commitment to civil rights – all documented here for the first time.” – J Randy Taraborelli, New York Times bestselling author of Jackie: Public, Private, Secret
- Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West, by John J. Sullivan. For weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John J. Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, was warning that it would happen. When troops finally crossed the border, he was woken in the middle of the night with a prearranged code. The signal was even more bracing than the February cold: it meant that Sullivan needed to collect his bodyguards and get to the embassy as soon as possible. The war had begun, and the world would never be the same. In Midnight in Moscow, Sullivan leads readers into the offices of the U.S. embassy and the halls of the Kremlin during this climactic period. ”Midnight in Moscow is not only a compelling account of Sullivan’s years as our ambassador to Russia and a brilliant assessment of what lurks inside the mind of Vladimir Putin, but also a master class in how to be an effective, thoughtful, and humble public servant.”—James N. Mattis, General (Retired), US Marine Corps
- Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, by Sune Engel Rasmussen. No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than Afghanistan: an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning—and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle. Through the eyes of newly empowered women, skilled entrepreneurs, driven insurgents, and abandoned Western allies, we see the United States and its partners bring new freedoms and wealth, only to preside over the corruption, war-lordism, and social division that led to the Taliban’s return to power. "Sune Engel Rasmussen has crafted a rich narrative showing how America's longest war affected Afghans, from the women who bought into the idea that they could help chart their country's future to the men who were skeptical of the future that the West would actually deliver. He's managed to weave together all the faces of Afghanistan, and all the complexities, contradictions, surprises and tragedies lived over decades of conflict. His book manages to be both a lesson in empathy and a vital snapshot of history." —Kim Barker, author of The Taliban Shuffle
- Paris 1944: Occupation, Resistance, Liberation: A Social History, by Patrick Bishop.
The fall of Paris to the Nazis on June 14th, 1940, was one of the darkest days of World War II. And the liberation of the city on August 25th, 1944, felt like the brightest. The liberation was also the biggest party of the century: champagne flowed freely, total strangers embraced—it was a celebration of life renewed against the backdrop of the world's favorite city, as experienced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Capa. But there was nothing preordained about this happy ending. Had things transpired differently, Paris might have gone down as a ghastly monument to Nazi nihilism.
- Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America, by Shad White. Mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it’s a good story of rooting out corruption, and the work was done through cooperation between the Republican state auditor and a Democratic prosecutor. But the author—who is the aforementioned Republican auditor—is also a ravine MAGA lunatic, going by his Twitter feed. The book details how a small team of auditors and investigators, led by the youngest State Auditor in the country, uncovered a brazen scheme where the powerful stole millions in welfare funds from the poor in a sprawling conspiracy that stretched from Mississippi to Malibu.
- Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. In 1987, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses, and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison. Eventually independent investigators, new witness testimony, the foreman of the jury that convicted him, and a new Dallas DA convinced a Texas judge that Spencer had nothing to do with the killing, and in 2021 he was released from prison.
As Spencer’s fight to clear himself demonstrates, our legal systems are broken: expedience is more important than the truth. That is starting to change as states across the country implement new efforts to reduce wrongful convictions, and one of the states leading the way is Texas. “The author’s narrative persuasively demonstrates how deeply embedded racism is in the fabric of the American criminal justice system … A stirring account of a legal travesty that effectively reveals a rotten core within the justice system.” —Kirkus Review
- All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty: A History of Pain, Pleasure, and Power: 1860-1960, by Virginia Nicholson. In this book, we learn about rational dress, suffragettes’ hats, the Marcel wave, the Gibson Girls, corsets, and the banana skirt. At the centre of this story is the female body, in all its diversity—fat, thin, short, tall, brown, white, black, pink, smooth, hairy, wrinkly, youthful, crooked, or symmetrical; and—relevant as ever in this context—the vexed issues of body image and bodily autonomy. We may even find ourselves wondering, whose body is it? In the hundred years this book charts, the Western world saw the rapid introduction of new technologies like photography, film, and eventually television, which (for better and worse) thrust women—and female imagery—out of the private and into the public gaze. "Nicholson astutely draws out how 'demands and pressures on the female body' increased along with 'progress towards equality and liberation' as a patriarchal culture sought to reassert its control over women. Feminist fashionistas will want to add this to their shelf."
— Publishers Weekly
- A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings. Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles––a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.” So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children. "Searing...Levings’s visceral prose holds nothing back, and her efforts to let go of the patriarchal beliefs of her youth fascinate. This stands out among the rising tide of memoirs from those who’ve left the evangelical church." -Publishers Weekly
- Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World, Edward Dolnick. In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. No one had ever seen such things. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined that all those animals could have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world.
- Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, by Sara Imari Walker. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. "I am not my atoms. You are not your molecules. We are part of the current moment of a billions-year-old lineage of propagating information that has structured matter on our Earth since the origin of life." --Sara Imari Walker, author of this book. “With wit and clarity, Walker outlines a radical new approach to bridge the conceptual gap between non-life and life.” —Paul Davies, author of What’s Eating the Universe
- Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, by Arik Kershenbaum.
We are surrounded by animals and the cacophony of sounds that they make—from the chirping of songbirds to the growls of lions on the savanna—but we have yet to fully understand why animals communicate the way they do. What are they saying? This is only part of the mystery. To go deeper, we must also ask, what is motivating them? Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Acclaimed zoologist Arik Kershenbaum draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the animal kingdom’s most seemingly confusing or untranslatable signals are in fact logical and consistent—and not that different from our own. His fascinating deep dive into this timeless subject overturns decades of conventional wisdom, inviting readers to experience for the first time communication through the minds of animals themselves. “This informal look at the science behind what animals are saying to each other lets the reader experience other species' minds and dig into the science and study of communication . . . Charismatic animals chatting to each other—what's not to like?” —Booklist
- McMillions: The Absolutely True Story of How an Unlikely Pair of FBI Agents Brought Down the Most Supersized Fraud in Fast Food History, by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte. In March of 2001, Federal prosecutor Mark Devereaux cold-called Rob Holm, the head of security for McDonald's Corporation. Without explanation, Devereaux asked that Holm and several other McDonald's senior executives plan a visit to the Jacksonville, Florida, FBI. Once they were seated in an unremarkable conference room, sealed away in the hyper-secure FBI building, Devereaux began to lay out a shocking conspiracy, one that ran deep into McDonald's most beloved promotions: the Monopoly game. This is where they began to discover from 1989 to 2001, almost every high-value prize winner was actually illegitimate. But how could this happen and who all was behind it? A rookie FBI agent and a brilliant undercover operation led them to one man who brilliantly crafted a near-infallible nationwide conspiracy for fraud. Expanded from the wildly popular HBO docuseries with major new interviews, McMillion$ traces this massive crime, the intricate web of lies that bolstered it, and the tireless work of the FBI agents that unraveled it all.
- All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, by Orlando Whitfield.
Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London’s Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge. By 2019 things had spiraled enough out of control for Inigo to flee to the remote island nation of Vanuatu, 300 miles west of Fiji. Within a year, he was arrested by the FBI and extradited to America, where he was sentenced to seven years in prison for having committed more than $86 million in fraud. “Studded with blue-chip names, multi-million-dollar paintings, private jets and bottles of Dom Pérignon ’08, this tantalizing glimpse by a former dealer into the art world’s most rarefied stratum doubles as a cautionary tale about a largely unregulated industry where hubris, greed and fraud abound.”—The New York Times
- Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times, by Todd May. In this timely, fascinating examination, May, a renowned philosopher and advisor to the acclaimed TV show The Good Place, reasons both for and against the continuation of our species, trying to help us understand how and whether, the positive and negative tallies of the human ledger are comparable, and what conclusions we might draw about ourselves and our future from doing so. He discusses the value that only humans can bring to the world and to one another as well as the goods, like art and music, that would be lost were we no longer here. On the other side of the ledger, he walks us through the suffering we cause to nature and the non-human world, seeking to understand whether it’s possible to justify such suffering against our merits and if not, what changes we could make to reduce the harm we cause. As he explores the complexities involved with changes such as an end to factory farming, curbing scientific testing of animals, reducing the human population, and seeking to develop empathy with our fellow creatures, May sketches a powerful framework for establishing our responsibilities as a species and gives hope that we might one day find universal agreement that the answer to his title question should be No.
