There’s a researcher named Milagros Miceli who just made TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI. She’s not building faster models or raising billion-dollar rounds. She’s doing something far more important: she’s following the human thread that runs through every AI system we use.
Miceli spent years studying data workers, the people around the world who label, sort, classify, and filter the information that trains AI to do what it does. Many of them earn pennies per hour. Many have no employment contracts, no protections, and no voice. Some can’t even leave exploitative working conditions because their visa status is tied to their employer. These are the people whose invisible labor powers the tools that the rest of the world is calling revolutionary.
She eventually realized something uncomfortable: her research was winning her academic recognition, but nothing was actually changing for the workers. So she built something different. The Data Workers’ Inquiry gives data workers the authority to conduct and publish their own research, paid at the same rate as any other academic researcher. Their firsthand accounts have surfaced realities that years of conventional research could never reach.
It’s a powerful reminder that the technology does not exist apart from the people who build it.
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