The AI ​​value chain made visible

Is AI reliable or a runaway technology? Is AI taking our jobs? What is AI doing to our brains, our culture and our society? AI is discussed in many different ways. And that’s good. Ana Valdivia – Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence, Government and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute – has researched the AI ​​value chain and published a very clear and educational graphic on Twitter. It shows the connection between an engineer training an algorithm in the UK, a miner mining tantalum in Kazakhstan, an engineer in Mexico working in a data center, a worker in Taiwan making graphics processors, and a worker in Kenya, electronic waste is disposed of. The corresponding study is currently being published by the author on arxiv and, as the lively discussions about the graphic on Twitter show, is likely to be a topic of conversation. Ultimately, it’s about the invisible connections between our digital society – which ‘celebrates’ AI as a panacea and a threat of the first order – to a world in which ‘our’ AI is made. Only by exploring these connections can we conduct the many discussions we have about AI the way they should be conducted: with an informed eye for the ethical-ecological-economic inequalities and injustices on an international scale that we otherwise see in hide from our bubble.