The One Percent Rule

In an era where the rhetoric of innovation is indistinguishable from statecraft, Code Dependent does not so much warn as it excavates. Madhumita Murgia has not written a treatise. She has offered evidence, damning, intimate, unignorable. Her subject is not artificial intelligence, but the human labor that props up its illusion: not the circuits, but the sweat.

Reading her work is like entering a collapsed mine: you feel the pressure, the depth, the lives sealed inside. She follows the human residue left on AI’s foundations, from the boardrooms of California where euphemism is strategy, to the informal settlements of Nairobi and the fractured tenements of Sofia. What emerges is not novelty, but repetition: another economy running on extraction, another generation gaslit into thinking the algorithm is neutral. AI, she suggests, is simply capitalism’s latest disguise. And its real architects, the data annotators, the moderators, the ‘human-in-the-loop’, remain beneath the surface, unthanked and profoundly necessary.

The subtitle might well have been The Human Infrastructure of Intelligence. The first revelation is that there is no such thing as a purely artificial intelligence. The systems we naively describe as autonomous are, in fact, propped up by an army of precarious, low-wage workers, annotators, moderators, cleaners of the digital gutters. Hiba in Bulgaria. Ian in Kibera. Ala, the beekeeper turned dataset technician. Their hands touch the data that touches our lives. They are not standing at the edge of technological history; they are kneeling beneath it, holding it up. Many of these annotators are casually employed as gig workers by the US$ 15 billion valued Scale.AI.