[1/2] Feeding the Machine (How to feed the car) (AI column)

I have always appreciated expanding our knowledge and capabilities about the world around us. Since I was a child, I have been interested in how everything works, so I like the rapid pace of development of science and technology. But in this book, the authors raise interesting questions about what is behind the beautiful facade of AI. (artificial intelligence)The hottest technology to date. The title of the book is a metaphor for a machine that we feed with our work, knowledge and skills in the hope of a happy future. This is told by three authors James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Kant. James Muldoon is a Lecturer in Management at the University of Essex, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Head of Digital Studies at the Autonomy think tank. His research is devoted to the use of modern technologies for the benefit of society. Mark Graham is the director of the Fairwork project and a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute specializing in global digital labor markets. Callum Kant is a senior lecturer at the University of Essex Business School who studies labor, technology and contemporary crises. In general, a worthy team for discussing such a complex topic.

The authors follow the path of telling about the entire chain of data extraction, spending a chapter on each stage. In the end, we have this list of chapters. 1) The Annotator (marker) The chapter focuses on employees who manually mark data used to train artificial intelligence models (AI). These workers perform monotonous tasks for low pay in precarious working conditions. It also describes the work of content moderators for conditional social networks. The authors have worked extensively on the African continent and show how it works in Uganda. In fact, such work is usually outsourced to the countries of the Global South and performed very cheaply, since it does not require special expertise and can be moved anywhere in the world.

Continuation of the review in next post.

#AI #Software #Management #Processes #Productivity