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Tech companies pay poor Kenyans to produce training data for AI

146 points| zeristor | 7 years ago |bbc.co.uk | reply

112 comments

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[+] Fricken|7 years ago|reply
I think it's underappreciated just how much human labour goes into annotating data fro autonomous vehicles. Scale is a fast growing start-up, with 35 employees and around 10,000 contractors, many based out of India and Africa, who do data annotation for Cruise, Zoox, Lyft, and Nutonomy among others.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/07/scale-whose-army-of-humans...

[+] threeseed|7 years ago|reply
Also the recent Maps story about Apple and how they might be using human labour to trace satellite imagery to identify the buildings.

I also wonder how many companies are using Amazon Mechanical Turk to automate their processes.

[+] api|7 years ago|reply
Given that this training data basically gets loaded into neural nets, etc., can it be said that in some indirect sense these data labelers are actually driving these cars? Are we still just building the mechanical turk?

To be it shows how far we still are from biological intelligent systems. I don't recall having to point out what an apple is to my daughter more than a few times. Watching children learn is breathtaking. Even much simpler brains like those of rodents or cats are far beyond anything built so far in silico.

[+] NightlyDev|7 years ago|reply
"Brenda trains data used for artificial intelligence"

I like how the writer always mentions that they are training the data used for AI, when they are in fact tagging data, not training anything...

[+] improbable22|7 years ago|reply
That's a curious slip, well spotted. I wonder if the caption-writer heard about "training data" and misunderstood that it's an adjective?
[+] pentae|7 years ago|reply
I just find the mental gymnastics fascinating that they are talking about how these people are living in abject poverty, and yet in the same article have the gall to highlight how people in the US are losing their jerbs. Which is it? Are we helping people in poor countries have a slightly better quality of life by working in an air conditioned office vs agriculture, or are we taking US jobs? It's one or the other.
[+] BurningFrog|7 years ago|reply
It's obviously both.

Does "It's one or the other" come from some idea that this must either be "good" or "bad"? Just trying to make sense of this strange assertion.

[+] azernik|7 years ago|reply
Why can't it be both?
[+] credit_guy|7 years ago|reply
The job of tagging data for supervised learning did not exist 10 years ago. Now that it exists, the first people to be employed in this job are in low-wage countries. These guys did not replace anybody in the first world. They are not "taking US jobs". Or do you have somehow in mind that the US workers should have first dibs at any new types of jobs?
[+] sandGorgon|7 years ago|reply
is there an opensource product to manage this kind of labeling ? features should include double entry, statistical error checking , etc
[+] gajju3588|7 years ago|reply
Its not open source but this tool helps in managing labeling by your in-house team or contractual workers. It also provides you annotation software for most of image and text usecases. Here is link to the same.

http://dataturks.com

[+] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
That's closer to human captcha solving business. I wonder, if Google's most recent captcha is actually being human generated?
[+] 1023bytes|7 years ago|reply
I think it's the other way around. Users solving the captcha are helping classify training data
[+] joaomacp|7 years ago|reply
Working conditions aside, this is ironic: AI development would supposedly get rid of boring jobs, instead it's creating exactly that.
[+] wrong_variable|7 years ago|reply
This is wonderful news !!

- By sending dollars to Kenya it's helping reduce inflation for the Kenyan govt. The biggest problem for many developing countries is finding a way to get their hands on the global reserve currency.

- Its allowing private wealth to be created (by women !!), empowering women have very positive cascading effects in a country (fertility rate drops, women have personal freedom to do other things ). Private wealth directly in the pocket of Kenyans is one the most efficient ways the developed world can help the developing world.

Normally giving cash to the govt results in looting of public coffers.

- Teaching useful computer skills to the average kenyan.

[+] nashashmi|7 years ago|reply
I don't follow the "very positive cascading effects" line. How is low fertility rate and women being free to do other things a positive cascading effect? Historically, it makes families more unstable.

Edit: I'm not saying women working is a bad thing. It's good on many fronts. But I feel the ripple effects are not positive.

[+] themihai|7 years ago|reply
I don't think they pay them that much for data entry/labelling but yeah... a job is a job.
[+] knieveltech|7 years ago|reply
There have been spontaneous demonstrations among the workers voicing their joy and gratitude at our happy new way of life. /s It seems pretty naive to assume that a handful of individuals being paid a fraction of the going rate for western labor is going to have a meaningful impact on the country's economy or lead to sweeping social changes.
[+] kelvin0|7 years ago|reply
They are not 'programme'-ing anything. They are tagging images and labeling objects in those same images.

They 'sweatshopped' the whole image tagging industry to 3rd world countries.

[+] dang|7 years ago|reply
Yes, that title was baity and misleading, so we've changed it to a more representative phrase from the article. A photo caption, actually; it's surprising how often those make better titles.
[+] themihai|7 years ago|reply
>> "But one thing that's critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labour markets. If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off. That would have a potentially negative impact on the cost of housing, the cost of food in the communities in which our workers thrive."

What a joke! We don't to pay them more because they will be able to buy decent house/invest in infrastructure or god forbid even start a small business...that would totally distort local labour markets, right?

[+] imtringued|7 years ago|reply
Yes especially the last sentences reads as "our workers only thrive in poor communities and we are doing them a favor by keeping them poor"

Western food aid has distorted the price of food in African countries already and resulted in local farmers losing their job. The housing market is only problematic in cities that restrict new construction. All these companies are doing is hiding their greed. They don't care about the well-being of the workers at all.

[+] CPLX|7 years ago|reply
The answer is smarmy and disingenuous for sure.

With that said they appear to be paying people 4.5x more money than they had been making before, so it’s hard to get mad at them.

I’m sure they’re in it for money and glory too but bringing modern employment prospects to Sub Saharan African slums is hard and it’s a lot easier to snipe from a distance.

[+] bko|7 years ago|reply
If the going wage of an employee with some skill is X and you decide to pay some arbitrary amount above X, how do you fill your ranks? What's a fair system? You have 10 equally qualified people going for 1 job.

One way is to make decisions based on non-economical conditions, such as attractiveness or familial connection.

Another way is lottery, which I admit is more fair, but it's still not fair to those that are willing to do the job for a lower wage than someone who got the job. It's okay to compete for a job by promising to work harder, but somehow negotiating a lower salary is unacceptable?

And the other big problem with paying above market wages is that it often introduces a middle man. Since you're swamped with applications, you hire a firm to sort everything out. The firm takes a cut as well and normally ends up bringing down the employees wage to the market wage. On the extreme, if the job is so lucrative, the middle man requires payment or a portion perpetual of the salary for the job placement. This happens in cruise lines:

> Long hours and subsistence wages are part of their contracts, as is the threat of being fired without notice or cause. Yet people from some of the world's poorest nations are so eager for work that some pay middlemen the equivalent of a month's wages to get these jobs, a fee that violates international law.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/24/us/sovereign-islands-spec...

[+] ozim|7 years ago|reply
Or become target for local mob that did not get the job. Become target for police which might also be corrupt.

In some places you can get badly beaten up, robbed and whatever else for having only a bit more than others.

I am not saying they are entirely right with what they do, but there are legitimate reasons for that kind of approach.

[+] otras|7 years ago|reply
Although a much less extreme example, this brings to mind GitLab's model of location-based pay [0]:

"Market rates for roles are different for different regions and countries. We pay market rates instead of paying the same wage for the same role in different regions."

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

[+] kelvin0|7 years ago|reply
Isn't this what happens in SF an SV? Big tech money certainly 'disrupted' the local housing market to name only that facet of the economy and social life.

So the article is right about the local disruption, but who are they to decide what's good and what's not for local people who deserve a fair compensation?

[+] pbhjpbhj|7 years ago|reply
If that were the reason, then using the wage savings they could fund a local charity to run infrastructure projects - build schools, say; maybe wind/solar farms owned by the local communities.

That way the whole country will develop and they'll be able to pay their workers more without distorting things anymore than is the case elsewhere.

Depressing wages locally will just lead to economic migration and brain-drain, surely? Ultimately that seems much worse.

[+] cossray|7 years ago|reply
My heart sunk on reading that. Overall, the whole initiative is positive. But given the working conditions lightly touched in the article, this is amounting to pure exploitation
[+] umichguy|7 years ago|reply
I was literally cringing when she spouted this nonsense. If that's the case, maybe they should do the same in the Bay Area as well. It won't distort the housing market etc.
[+] knieveltech|7 years ago|reply
Agreed, that is a particularly offensive line of bullshit. Labor arbitrage is a thing, sure, but it takes a special flavor of insipid shithead to try to unfurl that kind of tortured logic to handwave past the obvious exploitation taking place.
[+] ashelmire|7 years ago|reply
The truth is, the annotation being done does not require much skill. If the cost of paying people rises too much, companies will just turn to mturk and get it done for cheaper (in academia we already do this).
[+] nl|7 years ago|reply
To be clear (and to no one's surprise): No one is paying poor Kenyans to program self-driving cars.

They are being paid to label data.

[+] nmstoker|7 years ago|reply
Yes, and it's a shame because there's still plenty of value to be had from the article.

It's obvious that the end comment from the reporter is untrue, since by no definition could the workers be said to be becoming "AI experts" even if this is for some a step towards doing more challenging jobs.

It feels like it could be a combination of the reporters lack of knowledge, sloppy phrasing and getting carried away withthe enthusiasm with the situation.

[+] billfruit|7 years ago|reply
While the main stream media is eager to portray fakenews as the gravest threat to free society, this type of clickbait headline writing essentially exposes their duplicity. So while the press like to pontificate from their ivory towers on their unalloyed noble purpose, they are ultimately human institutions, with all its ensuing fallibility, all its flaws.
[+] r_singh|7 years ago|reply
Off-topic, but does anyone have more info on the “call through encrypted line on Signal” bit at the bottom of the article.

Seems like signal is catch up, I’m gonna get on it too.

[+] emiliobumachar|7 years ago|reply
I have no inside info, but presumably it's a call-out to potential journalistic sources. The call-out emphasizes secrecy to assuage fears of retaliation by third parties not happy to see the news spread.

The reporters Edward Snowden reached out to almost missed out on the story because it seemed too much work to install and learn to use the secure communication tools Snowden asked for before saying what it was all about.

[+] bitexploder|7 years ago|reply
You should definitely use Signal. It is usable and secure, rare things.
[+] MaupitiBlue|7 years ago|reply
So these are the white collar knowledge jobs of the future?
[+] statguy|7 years ago|reply
These are the blue collar jobs.The white collar jobs are about designing the network architectures and training them.
[+] amrx431|7 years ago|reply
Click bait article like these are the reasons that Trumps branding of prestigious media houses as "Fake news" found resonance among the masses. Kenyans are not being paid to program driverless cars but to label data. There is a Himalayan difference in skillsets required for programming driverless cars and labelling data. BBC should no better. But why would they care? They got me to to click the article and increase their visitor count.