Cambridge Forum continues its investigation into the impact of AI: Servant or Master?  with FEEDING THE MACHINE on Thursday, December 19.  The proliferation of A.I. offers seemingly limitless implications for the future, however what is less known about, is the hidden human cost of the labor that feeds this machine - and it is horrific.   

Silicon Valley 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, laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible.

Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centers in Kenya and Uganda and the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to very disturbing material is the norm. The daily demands of the job are inhuman, content moderators for companies like Meta are expected to watch hours of suicides, rapes and torture  -“almost every day… you normalize things that are just not normal.” 

The authors of Feeding the Machine, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant are based at Oxford University at the Oxford Internet Institute. They describe A.I. as “an extraction machine that feeds off humanity’s collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms.”  The purpose of their investigation was, “to give voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized & colonial exploitation.” 

Muldoon, our guest speaker, is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Essex.  Muldoon, Graham and Cant conducted hundreds of interviews during countless hours of fieldwork collected over more than a decade. The book describes the lives of the workers who are deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. The examples move from California, to Iceland, to Kenya, to Mexico and beyond, featuring stories from different composite characters. The data annotator in northern Uganda clicking through endless footage for $1.16 an hour; to the artist whose voice has been sold online; to the engineer pressured to deliver an imperfect final product, without ethical guidelines.  

The book provides an important and overlooked examination of the network that maintains an exploitative system, revealing the untold truth about the excessively high human cost of creating A.I.

Muldoon is joined in the conversation by Josh Miller-Lewis, co-founder and senior editorial director of More Perfect Union.

James Muldoon is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Head of Digital Research at the Autonomy think tank.

Join Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, in partnership with Brandeis University Press and American Ancestors for a wide-ranging discussion about a fascinating period of global history as experts from both sides of the Atlantic discuss maritime commerce--the innovation, benefits, and damages of the spice trade.

Learn how the drive of sea captains, worldwide consumers’ taste, and technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping— enabled navigation across unprecedented distances, from such embarkation points as Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon to the exotic ports of Malacca, Goa, Bombay, where they tracked down elusive spices. Such travels impacted art, literature, and science worldwide; and they were often disastrous for local populations, who were frequently exploited as slave plantation labor. This wide-ranging account of a fascinating period of global history uses original maps and contemporary artists’ views to tell the story of how each port developed individually; while also encouraging us to consider contrasting points of view of the benefits and the damages of the maritime spice trade.

Nicholas Nugent has 40 years’ experience researching and reporting for BBC World Service. He is the author of numerous books, including the biography, Rajiv Gandhi Son of a Dynasty(BBC Books) and Vietnam: The Second Revolution. Over the years Nugent has spent his spare time building a valuable archive of original maps.

The 11th annual Masterman Speaker Series event presented by Suffolk University Law School, titled "Truth in the Age of Disinformation, Misinformation, and AI", explores truth in an age of rapid and ever-expanding access to extensive amounts of information from a myriad of sources of varying reliability.

This year, the Masterman Speaker Series will examine how influential members of society, including the media, lawyers, and journalists/journalism schools, are adjusting – or are trying to adjust – to this brave new world, where people are increasingly relying on sources that may have been generated by AI, that may be tainted by disinformation and/or misinformation, and that may be coming from outside the fourth estate.

Jonathan M. Albano, a litigation partner in the Boston office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, who has over 40 years of experience representing news organizations, reporters, publishers and authors in libel, privacy and copyright actions, litigating public access to information claims, defending against subpoenas of confidential sources and unpublished journalistic materials, and counseling on pre-publication review matters.

Dan Lothian, the Editor-in-Chief of GBH News and the Executive Producer of The World national radio broadcast, as well as the former host of the GBH program State of Race, who has decades of experience in local and national radio and television, including more than a decade as a correspondent at CNN covering the White House, presidential campaigns, and breaking news, as well as seven years as a National Correspondent at NBC News with stories on Nightly News, the Today Show, and MSNBC.

Livable Streets is holding their 14th annual StreetTalk 10-in-1. As the tradition goes, ten speakers will take the stage to talk about topics like Boston transit history, public art, new approaches to housing, and more.

Light refreshments will be availble, along with a cash bar.

This year's speakers:
-Maha Aslam
Program Manager: Streets + Transit, LivableStreets
A Day in the Life of a Transit Advocate

-Julia Campbell
Deputy Chief of Streets for Infrastructure and Design, City of Boston
Fixing Boston's sidewalks, one intersection at a time

-Lorraine Fryer
Senior Content + Culture Manager, LivableStreets
How to Create a Cohousing Community in 10 Easy Steps

-Reynaliz Herrera
Founder & Director/Composer/Scriptwriter/Lead Performer of "Ideas, Not Theories"
Reynaliz Herrera’s Bicycle Music & her company “Ideas, Not Theories”

-Emily Isenberg
Founder & Creative Director, Isenberg Projects
Power to the People: Tactical Urbanism for a More Connected City

-Jarred Johnson
Executive Director, TransitMatters
Commuter Rail Is Doing Well, But Here's Why I Want It To Disappear

-Liz Luc Clowes
Director of Engagement and Food Forest Construction, Boston Food Forest Coalition
A network of 30 Food Forests in Boston builds a future of environmentally and socially resilient communities that thrive in many ways.

-Monica Tibbits-Nutt
Secretary of Transportation & CEO, Massachusetts Department of Transportation
The Intersectionality of Safety and Empathy

-Pete Wilson
Senior Policy Director, T4MA
Transportation finance and what it means to your community

-Giovanny Zuniga Piamba
Transit Justice Organizer, GreenRoots
Inclusive transportation begins when communities are part of the conversation

What is graffiti – is it vandalism, ornament or art? Anthropologist, Rafael Schacter proposes that we think of it as a monument – and it is indeed an ancient phenomenon. Originally thought to have come from the Italian archaeological term Graffito, meaning a deliberate mark made by scratching or engraving on a large surface such as a wall - nobody really knows. While the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians may have first coined the term, the definition and origins of modern-day graffiti continue to be debated, and Cambridge Forum is delighted to continue the discussion.

Schacter’s newest tome, Monumental Graffiti is a hefty and heavily researched read. In it, he shows why graffiti demands our urgent attention as a form of expression that challenges power structures by questioning whose voices are included in, or excluded from, the public space.

Schacter is joined by Cambridge graffiti artist, Caleb Neelon, co-author of The History of American Graffiti.

Caleb Neelon is a graffiti artist and co-author of The History of American Graffiti. Back in February 1990, Neelon was a 13 year-old kid, making a family trip to Germany, when he came upon the newly opened Berlin Wall, covered in graffiti and murals. It was a romantic revelation to the teenager who soon became immersed in the global graffiti scene, both as an artist and a commentator on the movement.