Screws are also very important, I imagine millions and millions of IKEA furniture falling downs if screws disappear magically. More seriously, for some structures it's much better and easy to use screws than nails. (Nails are very important too.) Anyway, I don't imagine that the operators in a screw or nail factory are getting payed millions per year.

There are hundred of economy books explaining how much you get paid, with different theories and interpretations, but if you can be replaced by a person that will do your work a minimal wage, you will probably get only a minimal wage.

Also, each label of the data is not so valuable, some are wrong, some are unclear, you must aggregate and process millions of labels. Imagine how little value they do get for each Captcha reply.

> Or, do we simply fire them once they fuel our algorithms.

Most works are like this. Imagine you are the main architect/engineer in charge of building the Empire State Building. They pay you for a few year to do the plans of the building, hiring the workers, buying the materials, whatever is necessary to do. After the building if finished, they thank you and now you are unemployed. (The workers are unemployed too.) You don't get a cut of the profits of the building.

The funny thing is that it us the exact sort of "low tier - low skill effectiveness, high demand, high supply, low wages" job that aitomation was demonized for getting rid of they are facing complaints over making.