ah, but let's not get carried away before sarah changes your life forever. there's another story to tell one with less special effects. this story takes place behind the scenes of those businesses who are working to invent our future leisure started with. for now, it's hardly this wonderful world where machines are working entirely for mankind. in fact, you could say is exactly the opposite. humans are involved in every step of the process when you're using anything online, but we're sold as this miracle of automation. google, facebook, amazon, goober, these digital giants are using a completely invisible workforce to keep their applications running area with technology to actually find them, pay them

a tiny amount of money. um 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 could do $5.00 now. at a really bad day. i could do $0.10 now. i mean it, 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 weekly, can see that you cannot mention that you are working for the thought that we went under cover as one of these web cleaners working as a content moderator for facebook. i opened those a few things that i saw. those things are going there with me because i remember

them as it was yesterday to meet the workers hiding behind your screen. we're 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 need. i mean, i think it's just that mm. 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 tomorrow 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. 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 does our, our best gust and play with cool and relaxed booth probably, or worse dressed and play with . do you play medicine?

i think a pretty good. i don't know. maybe it 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. 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 feel especially proud of, you know, something like tesco right is able to, to use 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 appeal, we frankly need to stop. oh,

the in this is mr. brown had a p r. ah, 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 like, ah, a to get a better understanding of why 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 in a car, but of course it's incredibly important that these cars don't run into pedestrians . so the car camera just sees 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 want to teach a self driving car to recognize a pedestrian, a human like you or 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 a box around. who do this up? 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 into 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 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. ah,

there we are. ha success. jerrod 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 math and she's progress. and the 2 results are any homegrown organic mac and cheese and handy is really shed 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, garrett 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 $180.00 questions over the course of half a our how much the earned $0.15 for how long a half hour. which when bill 30 cents the hour. yeah. which are pretty. definitely not level a livable wage that's for sure to they have are 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 the, it's no way 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 i together were 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. did the democratic republic of congo is among the richest countries in the world and natural resources, but he cannot mclee it? still one of the poorest cobalt is an essential material in manufacturing batteries from odin, devices like electric cars, mobile phones and computers. 60 percent of the wealth cobalt reserves are in congo 20 percent of it comes from small scale mines. unicef figures confirm that in 2017 co than 40000 children worked in cobalt mining in the republic to enter living and pay for schooling. next time you use a fancy gadget like a smartphone camera laptop, just remember that there's

a chance it works thanks to what child, how'd labor, children like john michelle. henry at o countless others like them. ah. and i dream shaped by frontier some of those with, ah, there's things we dare to ask in what happened? i make. no, certainly no board is a piece and

you as a marriage, we don't have a charity. we don't look back seen the whole world, leads to take action and be ready. people are judgment, common crisis with we can do better, we should be better. everyone is contributing each in their own way. but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever. the challenge is great. the response has been massive. so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together with after leaving oregon, we decided to take advantage of what we 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 us several minutes to draw around 10 objects and earn $0.02 on the list of task. figure 8 also offers evaluations 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, it's 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 nets. ghost workers, the human side of the figure, 8 lou. her name is don carbone. she is 46 years old. oh, hello. oh, much. well, you're welcome. you. well, i, yes i how we had a blizzard, not that long now. and then we have is also a big negative seminar. don is a single mother. she lives here with 3 of her children. hey, this is what subsidized housing looks like up here. i mean, it's not bad for public housing. she lives and

works here working on the figure 8 site all day. i'll turn it on. like i said, right before 7 o'clock and get the initial stuff done. i'll turn, 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 at bus my like 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. you 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 right now? i'm on 3 f in level 3. have been level 3 for quite a while. don is considered a high performing worker figure 8, therefore offers or more work than a beginner. but it isn't necessarily more interesting. ah, i have to put bounding locks in the room. people not really keen on this child. 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 that this is a fair payment? was you know? 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 healthy as a stay at home mom it it helps with added income. yeah. dont prefers to work from home because her youngest daughter jane has autism. when don wants to be there to take care of her when she gets home from school at 3 pm. so i was go, good day are back really

a good day, lou with her autism. i always have to be ready to jump my car, go get a phone. so 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 at 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 and amazon mechanical turk, a platform provided by amazon and his boss, jeff bezos, who invented the concept in 2005. think of it is micro work. micro working is a growing concerned for the i l. o. the international labor organization. a un agency in charge of protecting worker's rights across the globe.

hello, janet. this is dawn. jeanine burn is the resident expert on this subject that the aiello who speaks to us through skype. with globalization, you can see where it is kind of a global labor force. here is the next step is really did the service industry backing break up? we're into kind of very short to little 16 tasks. oh damn voltage issue to workers all over the world to compete for the job. do the job and the price of the wages are down because it is low, the labor supply, and the technology has, has system retain, etc, etc. the other, the main advantage. jeanine berg wrote a report calculating that micro workers earned on average $3.31 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 sitting down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you and then fire them after those 10 minutes. but with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore. while 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 don't 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? 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'm not sure i want to go in this direction. yeah. i think it's a different direction and i rather this of a i thing. 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 guess i've had them for more than a i conversation in that across the season. now i don't know. i didn't i don't really wanna do. oh yeah, we can find someone else to other stuff. okay,

so it's not comfortable with it with this part of the ah, nascar. now, if you're a, it is an important part of the conversation. things as it is not the a i can't say, ah, we don't have time to pull up the video lucas, be walt makes a hasty exit without saying goodbye and leaves us alone with his head. o. p. r. one last chance to ask how the business treats these contractors as they call them here i was 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? that's that. i think we're that 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 b. walt and his views on his workers. we thought we'd try a different tax. oh mm hm. on the day, the figure 8 founder made his statement on disposable workers. there were other entrepreneurs amongst him, as well as a researcher, the late iranian, just on the right. ah, 10 years after the conference we find lily living south of los angeles, california. ah, really, your 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, i 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 bad at an eyelash. how do you explain 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, 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. ah. with one you more they directly resell, advertised as a content to us and decide who sees what content when and how much of it. facebook claims that these algorithms are there to learn about our specific preferences. actually, this is untrue. there are shapely preference if tomorrow a person finds a fake poor legit video we're saying the earth is flat, then this content ranks her at least 20 percent or maybe even 40 percent

or believe it is true has a very dangerous thing. oh is your media a reflection of reality in the world transformed what will make you feel safer? place elation for community. are you going the right way or are you? i read. what is true war his way in the world corrupted. you need to descend, have join us in the depths or remain in the shallows.

ah ah, in the stories that shaped the week russia flung hysteria over what's being claimed or is the legit plans to invade ukraine. as western officials urged citizens to leave the country? i made daily media headlines, but it is imminent. believe clear truck convoy protested in canada from a u. s. border bridge. they've been blocking for a week. the country's prime minister labeled members of the anti coated monday movement on canadian. this is a story of a country that got through this pandemic, by being united and a few people shouting and waving. swastikas does not define who can either.