The real ethics of AI are about the labour underpinning it

We think that the ethics of AI are about restricting the actions of advanced machine-learning algorithms to operate within specific normative moral bounds. What we don't often acknowledge is that such learning often still depends upon vast quantities of human labour to filter the datasets. This work is repetitive and mentally scarring. And it is paid very badly. Those who preach the need for AI ethics principles are also, often, Silicon Valley billionaires. Yet their wealth relies on the exploitation of people who filter and moderate content, to feed to AI. Perhaps we should address the ethics of this, before we heed the cries for ethics to be transferred solely to the realm of machine regulation