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ALT After an embarrassing amount of trial and error, I made it to the actual work, only to make the horrifying discovery that the instructions Iād been struggling to follow had been updated and clarified so many times that they were now a full 43 printed pages of directives: Do NOT label open suitcases full of clothes; DO label shoes but do NOT label flippers; DO label leggings but do NOT label tights; do NOT label towels even if someone is wearing it; label costumes but do NOT label armor. And so on. There has been general instruction disarray across the industry, according to Milagros Miceli, a researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany who studies data work. It is in part a product of the way machine-learning systems learn. Where a human would get the concept of āshirtā with a few examples, machine-learning programs need thousands, and they need to be categorized with perfect consistency yet varied enough (polo shirts, shirts being worn outdoors, shirts hanging on a rack) that t
ALT The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human. Instruction writers must come up with rules that will get humans to categorize the world with perfect consistency. To do so, they often create categories no human would use. A human asked to tag all the shirts in a photo probably wouldnāt tag the reflection of a shirt in a mirror because they would know it is a reflection and not real. But to the AI, which has no understanding of the world, itās all just pixels and the two are perfectly identical. Fed a dataset with some shirts labeled and other (reflected) shirts unlabeled, the model wonāt work. So the engineer goes back to the vendor with an update: DO label reflections of shirts. Soon, you have a 43-page guide descending into red all-caps.
ALT Worries about AI-driven disruption are often countered with the argument that AI automates tasks, not jobs, and that these tasks will be the dull ones, leaving people to pursue more fulfilling and human work. But just as likely, the rise of AI will look like past labor-saving technologies, maybe like the telephone or typewriter, which vanquished the drudgery of message delivering and handwriting but generated so much new correspondence, commerce, and paperwork that new offices staffed by new types of workers ā clerks, accountants, typists ā were required to manage it. When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.
