There, while the customer waits on the phone, one of a roomful of headphone-wearing "intent analysts"transcribe everything from misheard numbers to profanities and quickly directs the computer how to respond.His group alone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying people to annotate images."We’ve transformed those jobs," Whigham says."It’s a good platform to increase your skills and support your family," she says.From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework — drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can’t quite make out."We want to be the ones that can label any image without any human involvement," says Ian Parnes, CloudSight’s head of business development."Aria Khrisna, a 36-year-old father of three in Tegal, Indonesia, says doing things like adding word tags to clothing pictures on websites such as eBay and Amazon pays him about $100 a month, roughly half his income.For the most part, even companies trying to push humans out of the loop still rely on them.When a computer can’t make out a customer call to the Hyatt Hotels chain, an audio snippet is sent to AI-powered call centre Interactions in an old brick building in Franklin, Massachusetts.But it’s not just a fancy computer program spitting back responses.Researchers have tried to find workarounds to human-labelled data, but the results are often inadequate. In the end, she says, she spent $35,000 to hire auto dealer experts to label her data.She earns about 50 cents an hour, but in a crisis-wracked country with runaway inflation, just a few hours’ work can pay a month’s rent in bolivars.Major automakers like Toyota, Nissan and Ford, ride-hailing companies like Uber and other tech giants like Alphabet Inc.This human input industry has long been nurtured by search engines Google and Bing, who for more than a decade have used people to rate the accuracy of their results.
You can’t trust the algorithm 100 per cent. This burgeoning but largely unseen cottage industry represents the foundation of a technology that could change humanity forever: AI that will drive us around, execute verbal commands without flaw, and, possibly, one day think on its own.The need for human labellers is "enormous" and "dynamic," says Robin Bordoli, CEO of labelling technology company CrowdFlower. If the algorithm doesn’t have a good answer, one of its 800 employees in places like India, Southeast Asia or Africa type in the answer in real time.These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece.But the product shots didn’t look anything like the car images in Street View, and the program couldn’t recognise them.When Amelia fails, the program listens while a call is rerouted to one of about 60 service desk workers. Humans will be in the loop "for a long, long, long time to come," he says.Several companies like Alphabet’s Waymo and game-maker Unity Technologies are developing simulated worlds to train their algorithms in controlled scenarios where every object comes pre-defined.".There’s a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It’s powered by hundreds of thousands of real people.
