During this lecture, Julian Posada (Yale University) will present his research on how today’s AI systems depend on a largely invisible global workforce whose labour is exploited by digital platforms shaped by deep social inequalities and power imbalances. He asks whether AI is a tool for freedom or an engine driving the widening gap between the unseen workers who train machines and the corporations that profit from them.

Concealed behind digital platforms, a vast, dispersed, and largely invisible workforce generates and annotates the data that powers today’s AI boom. In his book Platform Extractivism: Data work and the people powering Artificial Intelligence, Posada argues that these platforms are engines of extraction rooted in social inequalities and transnational power disparities.

He reveals that technology, especially today’s so-called AI, is not artificial, autonomous, or intelligent; it inherently relies on and extracts from humanity. Drawing on mixed-methods research on three platforms in the Venezuelan data work sector, Posada exposes the human cost of this technology, revealing how digital platforms have capitalized on economic instability, targeting vulnerable populations to extract value from their precarious labor.

Curator & chair of the lecture: Fabian Ferrari, Assistant Professor in Cultural AI, Utrecht University.

About the speaker

Julian Posada is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of information, with a particular focus on the relationship between labor and artificial intelligence. He earned his PhD from the University of Toronto.

Registration

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