or using anything online, but were sold as this miracle of automation. google, facebook, amazon, goober, these digital giants are using a completely invisible workforce to keep their applications running. with technology, you can actually find them, pay them a tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore. a workforce that is disposable and underpaid. on a very good day, i can do $5.00 now. at a really bad day, i could do $0.10 now. i mean, is it possible for you to be less than the american minimum wage? i'm not sure i want to go in this direction in both millions of men and women are training artificial intelligence for next to nothing others are being hired and hidden out of sight to clean up social networks. you must have been told by

replacing theme. if you cannot mention that you are working for this site that we went under cover is one of these web cleaners working as a content moderator for facebook. with a few things that i saw, those things organized there with me because i remember them as it was yesterday to meet the workers hiding behind your screen or taking you to the factory of the future. that digital economy's best kept secret. ah, you know, it's just like a sausage factory. they don't want people to come in to see how this often does meet. i mean, i think it's just that to delve into the mysteries of artificial intelligence. we're heading to the west

coast of the us here in san francisco and the silicon valley. the world of to morrow is being developed. it's the high tech hub of giants, like apple, facebook, youtube, hubert, netflix, and google. we have a meeting of figure 8, a business, specializing in artificial intelligence that primarily works with google, the founder lucas b wald. agreed to spend the morning with us. lucas. hello. hello guys. nice to meet you. thank you very much for your time, chris. i know you have a busy schedule. thank you. at 38 years old, this stanford graduate has already worked for the likes of microsoft and yahoo before founding his own company. once his microphone is on a quick tour of their start up style, california office base is our,

our best gust and play with cool and relaxed booth, probably or worse. dressed in play with the play. maybe i think a pretty good i don't know. very kind of our area is actually where i like to work my coffee got cold with and in the reception area and impressive display. these are some of our, some of our customers and the, the different things that they did with our, our products the, here's twitter. we helped them remove a lot of people that were kind of bullying on their website. you know, american express is up in france and yeah, you know, i've,

i feel especially proud of, you know, something like taska right is able to tease us to improve their, um and website to show better search results. so people can find the items they're looking for and i don't see google. oh no, i don't know. what do you know how like, why some of these get up so we frankly need to stop a. this is mr. brown had a p r o. after our visit, the founder explains the enigmatic name, figure 8, we call a company figure it because we think of it as a loop. and the loop really has these, these 2 parts, right? there's the humans that do the labeling. and then the machine learning that learns from the humans, and then it goes back to the humans for more labeling, right? so we think of this kind of like beautiful loop, right? where humans do the best things that humans can do. and the algorithms that

artificial intelligence does the best things that the algorithms can do, and we put that together. and that's what we call it li. ah huh. you get a better understanding of why a, i need humans to function. we stopped joking around and get out the computer so here's an example. you know, a lot of people these days are trying to build cars that automatically drive. like, for example, tesla has a system where you can drive around and a car, but of course it's incredibly important that these cars don't run into pedestrians . so the car camera just see something like this. so it's really important that they build reliable systems that can identify people. and the way that they learned, identify people is looking at lots of pictures of what the cars seeing from the camera. and then i'm actually literally labeling where the people are. so here's

a real example of how it works. if you wanted teach a self driving car to recognize a pedestrian, a human like you are, i, it 1st has to identify pedestrians from photos and then feed this information to the ai. and this process has to be done over a 1000, even a 1000000 times over, which can be very time consuming. this is where figure 8 gets involved using real people who are paid to do this work . to the task here is to look at this picture. and, and label where the people are. and so you get paid for this, you get paid to draw boxes around the people. how much. i'm not sure this task um, but you know, maybe it would be like um, you know, maybe $0.10 per person that you draw box around who do this job to have employees

doing this jobs and labeling people? yes, it's contractors on our, in our network that log in and did these jobs, what do you mean by contractors on, on your network? what kind of people? so it's like people that log in to this and then and then want to work on these tasks. how many people work for figure 8 in this capacity is as labor's. yeah. so again, it's people can kind of come and go if they want to. so there's maybe around a 100000 people that kind of consistently work every day for, you know, for certain use cases that we have. but then there's also millions of people that log in from time to time and work on tasks. and where do those people live? they live all over the world actually. so they live all over america and then they live all over the world. ah, so who are these millions of people who are being paid to train

a i technology in order to meet these contractors as figure a caused them. we leave silicon valley and had 500 miles north of san francisco in oregon. there we are. ha success. jared mansfield signed up to figure 83 years ago. he now spent several hours a week working for them. every day the company offers a list of tasks that he can complete for money. for example, training search engines long for this 1st one is showing examples of how to do it. the query is matt and cheese progress and the 2 results are any is homegrown organic mac and cheese and handy is

really should or microwave will macaroni and cheese, which are neither of them approaches. so it's saying that want to be equally bad matches. what's the use of doing that? a lot of it, i think it is to train search, search algorithms. so like when someone said that a computer and types of products, the algorithm will be able to determine with more accuracy, what product that is that that person's looking for. for every 10 answers, jared earns less than one cent. to get an idea of how much money he can make, we leave him to work for 30 minutes. he's answered 180 questions over the course of half an hour. how much the earned $0.15 for how long a half hour. which would be 30 cents the hour. yeah. which are

pretty definitely not level a livable wage. that's for sure. so they have with their i to do this. i mean, they have right to do whatever they want. i am the one coming to them for a little tiny bits of, of coins on this website. and it's no we, there's no contract between me and them. no contract, no salary, no guaranteed minimum wage. these ghost workers are paid to train software and robots using only one rule supply and demand with it definitely feels like i'm part of this invisible workforce. that is kind of made up of just random people throughout the world. and together we're kind of a training. what's going to replace the workforce as a whole? eventually jerrod is very philosophical about the idea. still he can afford to

be to earn a real living. he has another job showing chicken in the supermarket for a little more than $1500.00 a month. figure 8 is just what he does on the side to earn a little extra cash. ah ah ah lose

ah, well, they directly re sell advertise as content to us and decide who sees what content like when and how much of it. facebook claims that these algorithms are there to learn about our specific preferences. actually, this is untrue. they are shaping preference. yes, live to morrow. person finds a fake point where the gym video with saying the earth is a flat, then this content ranks. huh. at least 20 percent or maybe even 40 percent would really that is true. is a very dangerous thing. actually

either financial survival died. stacy blood learn about be allowed. let's say i'm a show i can hear great. i'm grief on face of the fight. wall street pod, thank you for helping with enjoy that right fell out dest slavery ah, after leaving oregon, we decided to take advantage of what we'd learned in america, and sign ourselves up to figure 8 to train artificial intelligence on the sites. welcome page. small tasks are proposed at 12, or 12 sense. we chose this as our 1st task, drawing boxes around objects in images. following the instructions,

it took a several minutes to draw around 10 objects and earn $0.02 on the list of task. figure 8 also offers he val way sions, of search engine answers, jared's task of choice. we could also listen to conversations and confirm if the recording features a man or a woman's voice. and if they are speaking english. hi is june there please. we work for hours without ever earning more than $0.30 an hour. ah, it's difficult to imagine that there are people who work on these task on a full time basis for in maine, on the east coast of the united states, close to the canadian border. we've arranged to meet with one of the net's ghost workers, the human side of the figure,

8 lou. her name is don carbone. she is 46 years old. oh, hello. hello. thank you so much for your welcome. beautiful. i. yes, i oh, we had a blizzard. not that long. no, no. mm hm. and it's also a big negative 7 out there. don is a single mother. she lives here with 3 of her children. this is what subsidized housing looks like up here. i mean, it's not bad for that because she lives and works here working on the figure 8 site all day.

i'll turn it on. like i said, my before 7 o'clock and get the initial stuff done. and i'll turn it. i'll turn this off at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then turn it back on at 9 o'clock at night. so i'll say 8 hours minimum. so i am bus my this would be the dashboard. and you could see i've done 6445 tasks since went 3 years. see these different badges now you start off, you have no batch and you have to do so many questions and get so many right. and then you get your 1st level badge, and then when you get to level 3, you have access to virtually all the tasks that are put up. what is your level level right now? i'm on the 3 f in level 3. have been level 3 for quite

a while. don is considered a high performing worker figure 8, therefore offer sure more work than a beginner, but it isn't necessarily more interesting. i have to put vending locks around, people not really keen on this job. the biggest problem is trying to find jobs that are viable right now. i don't have many years and it's definitely not better paid on a very good day. i can do $5.00 an hour out of really bad day. i could do $0.10 now . i mean, i mean i have had some really, really good days until february. yeah. do you think this is

a fair payment for sure. no, no, no, no, not at all. but i live in northern maine. we get a lot of snow it's. there's a very low job market and it helps b as a stay at home mom. it, it helps with added income. yeah. don prefers to work from home because her youngest daughter jane has autism. and don wants to be there to take care of her when she gets home from school at 3 p n. so our school good their bad day. really a good day with her autism. i always have to be ready to jump my car and go get her from school. i mean, it could happen one day or the week,

or not at all or 3 days out of the week. and the school is very understandings. i mean, i have to take out the whole week if i was working out of the home, don receive $750.00 in government aid every month, which isn't enough to cover all of her bills. this is why she signed up to figure 8 by working 8 hours a day and 5 days a week. she says she earns on average $250.00 a month on the site. on figure 8, the pay is non negotiable. if you refuse the work, there will always be someone else to take it all. there is an unlimited supply of these ghost workers coming from all over the world. it's probably why lucas be walt

is so happy. but he isn't the only one to take advantage of this phenomenon. various other businesses propose these sorts of repetitive and underpaid online tasks, the biggest amongst them being click worker, an amazon mechanical turk, a platform provided by amazon and his boss, jeff bezos, who invented the concept in 2005. think of it as micro work. micro working is a growing concerned for the i l. o. lee international labor organization, a u m. agency in charge of protecting worker's rights across the globe. hello, janet. this is on janine burg as the resident expert on this subject at the ilo, who speaks to us through skype. with globalization, you can see where it is and kind of a global labor force. here is the next step is really does the service industry

backing break up? we're into kind of very short a 16 tasks. i told you to you workers all over the world to compete for the job. you the jobs and the price of the wages are jared down because it is globally respite, and the technology has, has this to retain. s t s the other. the main advantage. janine berg wrote a report calculating that micro workers earned on average $3.00. $0.31 an hour without any rights and return workers. extreme vulnerability is the key to lucas b walls business model. after months of investigations, we found this video from 2010 that sums up his view of the labor force

before the internet. it'll be really difficult to find someone, sit him down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you and then fire them after the 10 minutes. but with technology can actually find them. pay them a tiny amount of money and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore. well, we were interviewing him. we wanted to ask him if he still shared the same opinion . but when we start talking about work conditions, the figure 8 founder seemed to lose his sense of humor. do you have an idea that i would revenue per hour of your contributor? you know, i'm not sure it's totally dependent on the task that someone puts in. and it's hard to track time on the internet because people can walk away from their computer and come back. so i don't know how much people done really make. there was a report on i know seeing that on average the people working on crowdsourcing were bait 3.331 dollars an hour. would that be consistent with what you

pay again, i'm not sure. is it possible for you to pay less than the american minimum wage? is it can be possible. so this is legal. i am not sure you want to go in this direction. yeah. i think it's a different direction and i rather this little more a i then yeah, but this is the whole thing. i mean this is about crowdsourcing as well. so i have to ask questions on crowdsourcing. oh, because it was more i have them for more than a i conversation than a crowdsourcing conversation. now i don't know english and i don't really wanna oh yeah, we can find someone else to other stuff. okay. so is not comfortable with this part of the ah, nascar noun, if you're a, it is an important part of conversation. things as if it did not be a i can say,

ah, we don't have time to pull up the video lucas, be walt makes a hasty exit without saying good bye. and leaves us alone with his head a p. r. one last chance to ask how the business treats these contractors as they call them here i, when i was working on this, i found many people complaining being disconnected as an effort. i actually have to go now to suits 11 o'clock. okay. oh, so you don't want to to speak about human envelope after that? i think we're done so only artificial intelligence. no human. well that's what we're prepared for so. sorry. okay, it's a pity to get some answers to our questions about lucas, be walt and his views on his workers. we thought we'd try a different tact. oh,

a. on the day, the figure 8 founder made his statement on disposable workers. there were other entrepreneurs amongst him, as well as a researcher lily iranian, just on the right. ah, 10 years after the conference, we find lily living sell to los angeles, california. ah, really, you ronnie teaches at the university of san diego and one of her special subjects is the working culture of high tech business. ah, we're lucky. she has a good memory to number. if somebody reacted after this sentence, which is very brutal in a certain way, to be honest,

the reaction was nothing. i remember that panel. every one went up to him to talk to him. and 2 or 3 people came out to me to talk about the ethics of this form of labor. this is a room full of highly educated people in san francisco. and nobody better than eyelash how to extend that. you know, the kinds of people who have access to these spaces are the kinds of people who never worked in a situation where they wondered if they could make ranch or they never worked in a situation where, you know, somebody gets sick and they can't pay someone to go take care of them. so they have to kind of take a really bad job at homer and they have no connection to the kinds of situations of the people that are willing to do this work. is what happens when you go to schools like stanford and harvard and princeton, that tell you, you're the smartest person and you're going to be a future leader. and you've been chosen because you're special and that you have the power to change the world.

hello good and bad dream shapes bankers are those with there's things we dare to ask. oh, is your media a reflection of reality in the world transformed what will make you feel safe?

isolation, whole community? are you going the right way, or are you being led to some direct? what is true? what is faith? in the world corrupted, you need to descend a join us in the depths or remain in the shallows. join me every thursday on the alex simon, sure. but i'll be speaking to guess in the world of politics, sport, business, i'm show business. i'll see you then. i made sure indian is the world's most over fish. see unsustainable exploitation of its fish dogs, which maureen biodiversity under great thread. a lesson given

a quote on sure you understand the says he cut our system. i'm not going to pull the cookie careful with tech and want to put our lives despite the promise is to end over fishing by 2020. the situation is changing to slow. well, i'm very disappointed with that. they basically not in public interest. they also do not in the midst of interest of the official is the only interest of the fishery and the facial and the only ones in danger. the fishermen also at risk of losing or picking them up someone group or they get it on the bottom of the bubble. thought, i guess it might be real. she's been with

them still with you asked me if russia wants to fight with nato. let me ask you, does nato want to fight a war with russia? that even a potent born is native to stop playing games and ignoring moscow security about the strong word covers the french and russian presidents agree to work on stability them at the 10th situation around ukraine. meantime, breaking from the pac. emanuel micron tension back on nato's ante russian rhetoric and calls for moscow security concerns to be heard. the u. s. though takes a different role with president biden threatening that a crucial european gas pipeline will be shell. if russia invade you crime. there will be no longer a north stream to we will bring it how will you do that? i promise you will be able to do.