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"AI" or Strip-mined Human Intelligence


Stashed in: Awesome, Amazon, Turing, Self-driving Cars, Bad Robot!, Artificial Intelligence, Training

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It seems to me that many people have a mistaken idea of what AI can really do, because they do not differentiate between what the algorithms can really add, versus the extent to which they simply encode human knowledge, without which they could not function.

A good example is self-driving cars.  My understanding is that this is a technology that could not function without constant strip-mining of human knowledge and decision making.  This is quite a real distinction... if everyone used the currently available "self-driving car" technology it would cease to function. 

In this light, TechRepublic's article "Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI" is an interesting read.  Is that "machine learning" you were dazzled with today really functional without armies of third world labor behind it?  Or perhaps some US citizens who make far less than minimum wage?

Labor producing data to train machines seems like one of the areas of job growth in the coming decades.

Also seems like the people producing the data should be paid better since the free market is likely to drive those wages down by exploiting the competition for those jobs.

Maybe The Matrix was slightly wrong.

Humans are not the batteries, but we are the inputs. We provide data, not energy.

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