Feeding the Machine cover art

Feeding the Machine

The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Feeding the Machine

By: James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Callum Cant
Narrated by: Orlando Wells
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £23.99

Buy Now for £23.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Big Tech 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 that labour under often appalling conditions to make AI possible. Feeding the Machine presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network of organisations that maintain this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of AI.

Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, this book shows us the lives of the workers often deliberately concealed from view and the systems of power that determine their future. It shows how AI is an extraction machine that churns through ever-larger datasets and feeds off humanity’s labour and collective intelligence to power its algorithms. Feeding the Machine is a call to arms against this exploitative system and details what we need to do, individually and collectively, to fight for a more just digital future.©2024 James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Callum Cant (P)2024 Canongate Books Ltd
Computer Science History & Culture Labour & Industrial Relations Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Politics & Government Technology & Society Technology Artificial Intelligence

Listeners also enjoyed...

AI Snake Oil cover art
The AI Mirror cover art
The Alignment Problem cover art
Blood in the Machine cover art
Biomimetics cover art
Superintelligence cover art
Artificial Intelligence cover art
Scary Smart cover art
AI Needs You cover art
Kingmaker cover art
Algorithms to Live By cover art
God, Human, Animal, Machine cover art
Unmasking AI cover art
Left Is Not Woke cover art
The Economics of Inequality cover art
Our Lives in Their Portfolios cover art

Critic reviews

'Feeding the Machine may just be the most important book to be written in the current fever of AI publishing. It shines a light into the darkest corners of this 'revolution', revealing the enormous human cost behind the giant servers and grinding labour farms that exploit and abuse the human spirit in order to provide a technology that itself exploits and abuses the human spirit. I urge anyone who uses, harnesses or leverages AI to read this and consider. What an important book' (STEPHEN FRY)

'I had no idea of the dark, tangled world of human exploitation and corporate greed that is fuelling the growth of AI. Here we meet people working impossible hours for pitiful wages - just so we can get our orders a couple of hours earlier, while some billionaire gets richer. If you think - as I once did - that the internet is a kind of 'free lunch' you need to read this extraordinary and essential book' (BRIAN ENO)

No reviews yet