The Future of AI Depends on a Huge Workforce of Human Teachers

When Katharine Rubin has a spare moment on the way to school, she helps a big-name tech company smarten up its artificial intelligence. Rubin, a 22-year-old accounting major at New York City's Baruch College, is part of a growing workforce that spends anywhere from 5 minutes to 40 hours a week increasing the I in AI. Specifically, Rubin and others provide training data for machine learning algorithms, a form of AI that can be taught from experience. For an autonomous car to recognize pedestrians and stop signs, it's typically fed thousands or millions of photos, all hand-labeled. To nail a conversation, a digital assistant needs to be told over and over when it's failed.