Criticism of the company's product seems pretty tangential to the blog post. Either way, the value provided comes not from the labeling alone, but from the platform it provides to be able to do so. If it were so easy, why don't these labellers bypass Scale AI entirely and make more money themselves?
There are plenty of jobs that pay better and don't require you to devote your lives to the company (incidentally, one of them is mentioned in the article). If a firm wants people who are obsessed with work, then that's their choice. However, I hope they recognize that they would also drive away plenty of talent with better options, so it's up to them to weigh the trade offs.
Singapore might be a flawed democracy, but it still is one. The ruling party does fear losing vote share in elections and adapts its policies to win public support (e.g. in the 2011 elections when the opposition won 40% of the vote).
We were doing speech recognition 20 years ago without any kind of networking. I dictated part of a term paper in 1995. Dragon Dictate I think is what it was called. You could even navigate the word processor menus and UI with it, or say things like “make that bold” and it usually worked! Just a bit less often often than Siri works actually.
Sure it was more of a novelty, and had to be trained on your voice. But that was 20 years ago.
