This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and The Verge and focuses on the work of Joe, a 30-year-old annotator who processes raw information used to train artificial intelligence. Joe was labeling footage for self-driving cars and was paid about $10 for a several-second blip of footage that took eight hours to annotate. Joe then had the opportunity to run an annotation boot camp for a new company, where 50 new recruits would file into an office building in Nairobi to begin their apprenticeships. Joe’s students were asked to categorize clothing seen in mirror selfies, look through the eyes of robot vacuum cleaners to determine which rooms they were in, and draw squares around lidar scans of motorcycles. Despite the tedious and repetitive nature of the work, it was a job in a place where jobs were scarce, and Joe turned out hundreds of graduates.
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