Earlier this month, the journalist Anuj Behal wrote about the trauma suffered by workers in rural India who are employed to moderate web content to train AI for big tech companies. He spoke to women who worked from home, viewing hours and hours of often violent and pornographic content.
It was a story of the unexpected, often hidden costs of our digital habits. It reminded me of a heated exchange at an event I was chairing 10 or so years ago when a member of the audience said newspapers were disgustingly unenvironmentally friendly and deserved to be extinct.
