But back in 2013, when I first met Chip, Airbnb was still just getting started. Though we had nearly four million guests staying in homes around the world, most people saw us as strictly a technology company. But Joe, Nate, and I knew we had more to offer. We knew that we weren’t just in the business of home sharing. We envisioned a community that helped people with not only where you stay, but what you do—and whom you do it with —while you’re there. In other words, a complete end-to-end trip. What we were actually selling was hospitality.

As of this writing, the world contains 433 “unicorns”—venture-backed companies that boast a market value of $1 billion or more. While these companies get a lot of press, they’re a relatively small part of their respective economies. In early 2020, US-based unicorns had a combined market value of $650 billion. This seems like a big number, but at the time amounted to just slightly more than 2 percent of the combined market value of the S&P 500. While entrepreneurial enclaves like Silicon Valley are important, we need to find ways to turn up the entrepreneurial flame in every organization.

It’s between $1 million and $10 million that the team needs to focus on cash. Growth sucks cash, and since this is the first time the company will make a tenfold jump in size, the demands for cash will soar.

Scale downgraded Kenya to a Group 5 designation: blacklisted. There was also another reason to exit Kenya. By then, Scale was moving on to a new focus, following the demands of the AI industry. OpenAI and its competitors were increasingly searching for highly educated workers to perform RLHF—doctors, coders, physicists, people with PhDs. So went the profit-chasing progression of chatbot development. Those willing to pay money for chatbots were not casual consumers but businesses that expected tools to perform complex tasks such as in science and software development. Kenya did not fulfill the new labor demand. Scale was now recruiting a fresh workforce primarily in the US with a new worker-facing platform called Outlier, offering as much as forty dollars an hour.

It was yet another stark illustration of the logic of AI empires. Behind promises of their technologies enhancing productivity, unlocking economic freedom, and creating new jobs that would ameliorate automation, the present-day reality has been the opposite. Companies pad their bottom lines, while the most economically vulnerable lose out and more and more highly educated people become ventriloquists for chatbots.

The empire’s devaluing of the human labor that serves it is also just a canary: It foretells how the technologies produced atop this logic will devalue the labor of everyone else. In fact, for the artists, writers, and coders whose labor the empires of AI turned into free training data, that is already happening.

Scale’s decision would send Winnie and her family spiraling. By then Millicent had lost her job and Remotasks had been the only thing keeping them afloat. Now they were struggling to feed their kids. Winnie was terrified they would soon be evicted. In her inbox, the email Scale sent to inform workers of the shutdown was cold and clinical: “We are discontinuing operations in your current location,” it read. “You have been off-boarded from your current project.”

Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery.