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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside your devaluation of the phrase "slave labor" by applying it to things that aren't slave labor, I'll just ask: what would you have these people do?

Should they take a 60% pay cut to do back-breaking labor at a construction site? Take a bigger pay cut to wash dishes at a restaurant? Or perhaps they could work long hours subsistence farming; that's a pretty common option in Pakistan, if the numbers I'm seeing are at all accurate. I know people who used to do this, and from what I hear it kind of sucks.

Taking distasteful options away from poor people because they might choose those options is one of my least-favorite forms of moral grandstanding, because it hurts people who already have it rough.

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Google search for “slave labor definition”: labor that is coerced and inadequately rewarded, or the people who perform such labor.

We can split hairs and debate semantics but that definition fits my use of the phrase.

I am not judging anyone doing the work. I’m judging the companies providing the “distasteful” options.

> I’m judging the companies providing the “distasteful” options.

To restate my actual argument, since you haven't really responded to it: what work would you have very poor people do instead? There are other options, but are those options actually better? And how would you or I know?

It seems a little insulting to presume that you know their lives and their employment options better than they do, and should choose in their stead. But that's exactly what people are doing when they put public pressure on these companies to withdraw unseemly-looking options.

I think a lot of people, many in the West with comfortable jobs, find it uncomfortable to admit that a lot of their lifestyle and maybe even their salary, depends somewhere down the supply chain on coercion (or at the very least, huge worker-employer power imbalances that look a lot like coercion) to make it all happen. We don't need to be able to rattle off a viable alternative, in order to express that there's something wrong.

I don't know if a job or product exists that, somewhere down the value chain totem pole, doesn't at some point rely on employers exploiting the threat of poverty to collect value from people.

Two things can be true at the same time.

In terms of employment, I would have anyone do the best they can to provide for their families. And it’s also a damn shame that the best option the people in question have is to label explicit content for AI for a dollar or two an hour at best.

I agree with you that providing an alternative should be part of the conversation and ultimate solution but providing an alternative is not a prerequisite to assert that something is unethical.

You talk about options like they have them. The main figure in the article said that they felt like it was digital servitude but a necessity. He’s not sitting down with a financial advisor to weigh his options and then deciding filtering smut for our AI overlords is a fiscally responsible decision.

To me, the issue is it's not enough to merely say "this job is unethical", unless your point is actually "the economic relationship between the first and third world is unethical". The first is true if the second is, but it's a small and weak part without the second explicitly stated to back it up.

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