The Washington Post paraphrased a take from the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics today, in a piece on AI’s impact on wealth inequality: “the entire US economy is being propped up by the spending of richer Americans going gaga on AI-connected stock gains.” The article reports that AI use is higher in richer regions, which in my view decreases the chances it’ll be an equalizing force.
Meanwhile, a New York Times profile provides a more visceral look at the relationship between higher and lower income regions. Workers in India make $2.50 an hour by strapping cameras to their heads while they do household chores and other physical tasks — data that can help robots learn to do these things as well as humans. Here, I’m going to endorse the cliche “a picture is worth a thousand words” and encourage you to look at the photo of the woman chopping vegetables with an iPhone strapped to her head.
This $2.50 per hour freelance work is one piece of the field of data annotation. The other pieces involve labeling and annotating the training footage, as well as watching hours of footage of robots performing tasks in the physical world and evaluating the robot’s performance via notes on each frame. The company profiled in the article is based in India, but its clients are mainly in the US.
Some data annotation workers have engineering degrees, even though the work does not require it. The New York Times notes:
As A.I. capabilities change how companies design and produce products — making jobs like coding disappear for college graduates — data annotation is showing how countries like India, with entry-level job shortages and large youth populations, are adapting.
I can’t help but wonder: is this adapting or is this a short-term solution that, in the long run, creates more problems? What happens when the robots have learned all there is to learn about completing tasks usually performed by humans?
I’m reminded of an article I covered back in June on how AI may be pushing us towards a gig economy: less stability, and a dark reality: in many fields, the only work people can find is training their own replacements.
If this continues to be a trend, it’s no wonder some economists worry that AI may increase the income gap between those who make their money from working and those who make it from profiting off of their businesses or investments.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.