Despite all those rapidly spreading fears about artificial intelligence making people redundant and potentially extinct, the technology’s developers remain deeply reliant on human labor—and are apparently not very good at getting the best out of their hidden workers.
That’s what I’ve taken away from a couple of interesting articles published in the last day. The first piece is a collaboration between New York Magazine and The Verge, in which writer Josh Dzieza looks into the growing ranks of A.I. annotators—people who have the tedious, poorly paid, and sometimes baffling task of sorting and labeling imagery from photos and videos, so A.I. knows what’s what.
