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‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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It's not just that it's slavery, but it's literally destroying the people doing it. Being exposed to so much horrendous content has lasting impact. It's like the coal mines (or any number of other body destroying examples) but it's not lungs that suffer, it's the brain.
I would say that it wasn't us, the ordinary people, who created this terrible world, but we definitely allowed the worst among us to do so - and we even rewarded them for it, so that this monstrous world is now ruled by the most ruthless, like a monarchy that was believed to have been overcome. Apparently, civilizational progress is not bound to the passage of time, as I strongly suspect that we are regressing civilizational: back to absolutism with its degenerate rulers who give free rein to their perverse desires - and they can do so, because they are at the top of a society they exploit with impunity.
I don't think that is a characteristic of our species. It is not universally true across other cultures.
And studies strongly suggest that the characteristic that was most important to the early survival of humans was altruism. There are always a lot more people who are basically good than basically bad. Only around 4% of the population are sociopathic.
Unfortunately, promoting sociopaths is a built-in characteristic of capitalism. Without controls, it rewards managers who are willing to sacrifice other people for profit (or power). The people who do that the best are those without empathy. So we end up with the worst of us making the decisions about how the world should work.
Social media was a mistake.
The first few years was just about fun and sharing high points of our lives (I was then pulled into Facebook by MMO clanmates initially for the casual games and for group communications). But then just came the fringers, the lechers, and the extremists, before entities like Cambridge Analytica arrived with the idea social media could also be used to manipulate the masses.