As her fellow patients read dog-eared magazines or swipe through Instagram, Shari Forrest opens an app on her phone and gets busy training artificial intelligence.
Forrest isn’t an engineer or programmer. She writes textbooks for a living. But when the 54-year-old from suburban St. Louis needs a break or has a free moment, she logs on to Mighty AI, and whiles away her time identifying pedestrians and trash cans and other things you don’t want driverless cars running into.
“I am sitting waiting for a doctor’s appointment and I can make a few pennies, that’s not a bad deal,” she says.
The work is a pleasant distraction for Forrest, but absolutely essential to the coming ages of driverless cars. The volume of data needed to train the AI underpinning those vehicles staggers the imagination. The Googles and GMs of the world rarely mention it, but their shiny machines and humming data centers rely on a growing, and global, army of people like Forrest to help provide it.
You’ve probably heard by now that almost everyone expects AI to revolutionize almost everything. Automakers in particular love this idea, because robocars promise to increase safety, reduce congestion, and generally make life easier. “The automotive space is one of the hottest and most advanced fields applying machine learning,” says Matt Bencke, CEO of Mighty AI. He won’t name names, but claims his company is working with at least 10 automakers.
Read more of the original article at Wired.
