DAIR

NEW FROM DAIR 📢 Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. 🧵 Based on in-depth interviews and direct organizing experience, "Drive Down" reveals how Amazon is using surveillance technologies to intensify driver workloads, instill a patchwork of uneven digital punishments and expose all drivers to potential wage theft and unsafe working conditions.

Today is the 12th anniversary of 369 Eritrean refugees who drowned in Lampedusa (Italy) exactly 12 years ago. As our researcher and refugee advocate Meron Estefanos wrote, one of them was 22 years old and was giving birth as she was drowning. Her body was later found with an umbilical cord attached to her baby. In this possible futures entry, @Meron Estefanos imagines a future where the families of the disappeared find closure.

DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute)

Closure for Families of the Missing

Behind every name is a family torn apart, a void where a loved one should be.

“These are really big, scary problems that are complex & challenging to address — it’s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking & wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution. I think it’s the reason that so many people turn to cults & all sorts of really out there beliefs when the future feels scary & uncertain [...] this is not different than that. They just have billions of dollars to actually enact their ideas.” @dylan , lead research engineer at the @DAIR

AP News

How Silicon Valley is using religious language to talk about AI

As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use to describe it is becoming in...

"“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. “These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

the Guardian

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

In this article for Africa in Fact, Adio writes: “The choice facing Africa is stark: continue as a data colony providing cheap labour for surveillance tools that serve foreign interests, or assert digital sovereignty by developing governance frameworks that prioritise African lives over foreign profits. ”

Africa in Fact

AI surveillance and data colonialism shape African conflicts  - Africa in Fact

On 3 November 2021, Professor Meareg Amare, a respected chemistry academic at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, was gunned down o...

Surveillance Watch now has an interactive diagram that shows the high level of funding towards various surveillance technology types:

Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

You can click through to explore by funder as well, example:

Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

The belly of surveillance capitalism can only be exposed by following the money to understanding who's complicit in the usage of tech for war crimes, genocides, any other grave injustices etc.

🔇🔇🔇Join us for an honest conversation with some of the people forging a better digital future. Event will be recorded for those who can't make it. ⏰ Thursday May 30th at 10am PDT/1pm EDT ➡️ Register at

Eventbrite

Imagining More: A Candid Convo About the Future of the Black Web Experience

Join us for a conversation with the people creating the next generation of social media platforms.

More info on our amazing speakers below🧵

Join us at

Twitch

dair_institute - Twitch

Twitch account for The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

in just a few hours for the launch of The AI Con (

THE AI CON

THE AI CON

How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

).

Distributed AI Research Community

Alex Hanna (@alex@dair-community.social)

Attached: 1 image TODAY at 2 PM PT! Join us as we celebrate the release of the THE AI CON! @emilymbender and I are so excited to chat with Vauhin...

"For all its promised benefits, the artificial-intelligence boom is likely to prove costly to public health and even lead to hundreds of deaths a year in the U.S. alone, and those ill effects are likely to disproportionately hit poorer communities, according to a study by California researchers..."

San Francisco Examiner

AI pollution could cost billions

Recent research projects AI data centers’ public-health harms.

Congratulations to @Timnit Gebru (she/her). for being awarded the 2025 Miles Conrad Awardee! "The award recognizes her critical work on the dangers of biases in AI as the information community grapples with ethics and rapidly advancing technologies." Dr. Gebru will deliver the Miles Conrad Lecture at #NISOPlus25.

Dr. Timnit Gebru to Receive the 2025 Miles Conrad Award

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Timnit Gebru, Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), will b...