Feeding the Machine cover art

Feeding the Machine

The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Feeding the Machine

By: James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Callum Cant
Narrated by: Orlando Wells
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £23.99

Buy Now for £23.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

 Big Tech has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions that labour under often appalling conditions to make AI possible. Feeding the Machine presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network of organisations that maintain this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of AI.

Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, this book shows us the lives of the workers often deliberately concealed from view and the systems of power that determine their future. It shows how AI is an extraction machine that churns through ever-larger datasets and feeds off humanity’s labour and collective intelligence to power its algorithms. Feeding the Machine is a call to arms against this exploitative system and details what we need to do, individually and collectively, to fight for a more just digital future.©2024 James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Callum Cant (P)2024 Canongate Books Ltd Computer Science History & Culture Labour & Industrial Relations Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Politics & Government Technology & Society Technology Artificial Intelligence

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The AI Mirror cover art
AI Snake Oil cover art
Superintelligence cover art
Artificial Intelligence cover art
The Unaccountability Machine cover art
Broken Money cover art
Scary Smart cover art
How AI Thinks cover art
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team cover art
Poor Charlie’s Almanack cover art
A Brief History of Equality cover art

Critic reviews

'Feeding the Machine may just be the most important book to be written in the current fever of AI publishing. It shines a light into the darkest corners of this 'revolution', revealing the enormous human cost behind the giant servers and grinding labour farms that exploit and abuse the human spirit in order to provide a technology that itself exploits and abuses the human spirit. I urge anyone who uses, harnesses or leverages AI to read this and consider. What an important book' (STEPHEN FRY)

'I had no idea of the dark, tangled world of human exploitation and corporate greed that is fuelling the growth of AI. Here we meet people working impossible hours for pitiful wages - just so we can get our orders a couple of hours earlier, while some billionaire gets richer. If you think - as I once did - that the internet is a kind of 'free lunch' you need to read this extraordinary and essential book' (BRIAN ENO)
No reviews yet