Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school. According to Ipeirotis, in October 2016, American Turkers are mostly women.

Toyota isn't alone in betting on AI; every other automaker, and software company, is looking closely at artificial intelligence. Toyota unveiled'Yui', the AI agent for a car, at the Consumer Electronics Show held in the US this week. Even Ford has entered the game, acquiring a machine learning company in Israel and shuttle-van startup Chariot. The Toyota Research Institute, which has built this technology, thinks these platforms can go live in car models by the end of the decade. It's a world that will see collaborative business models.

BlackBerry has announced the opening of its $100 million innovation centre aimed at developing software for autonomous and connected vehicles, a move that will also see the company more than double staff at its Ottawa, Ontario headquarters where the centre is located. The BlackBerry QNX Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Centre, launched on Monday by BlackBerry CEO John Chen and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is part of the company's strategy to make itself a player in the autonomous vehicles industry before it gains mainstream appeal. The 5 biggest tech trends of 2016: ZDNet editors sound off Five ways to make your digital strategy a success in 2017 Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI "50 percent of all cars will connect to the cloud by 2020 ... in the coming hyper-connected world, cars will soon carry one of the highest concentrations of Internet of Things edge nodes and sensors, generating a vast amount of valuable and actionable data," the company said in an announcement. "Anticipating this shift, BlackBerry is investing in key technologies and building a product portfolio that will provide the embedded intelligence that powers the core electronics of connected and autonomous cars." As part of the initiative, BlackBerry QNX will be recruiting local software engineers to work on ongoing and emerging engineering projects for autonomous and connected vehicles both independently and in partnership with public and private sector organisations.

Google's new Waymo self-driving car company showed the first images of its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan that will begin testing on public streets in 2017. In a Medium post on Sunday, John Krafcik, CEO at Waymo, said production of the self-driving hybrid minivan began in October and has been tested in a limited fashion at Fiat Chrysler's Chelsea Proving Grounds in Chelsea, Michigan, and its Arizona Proving Grounds in Yucca, Arizona. Krafcik showed images of the hybrid minivan with a suite of updated sensors, an all-new computer, and other major system updates. The 5 biggest tech trends of 2016: ZDNet editors sound off Five ways to make your digital strategy a success in 2017 Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI "Getting from program kickoff to production and full vehicle assembly in half a year is a testament to the strong teamwork and collaboration between FCA and Waymo engineers," Krafcik wrote. Earlier this month, Google's self-driving car project launched as an independent business, called Waymo, under Alphabet, Google's parent company.

"Every company that has an interest in automating a service has access to or uses some sort of platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk. According to Mary Gray, senior researcher at Microsoft, the firm's UHRS is "very similar" to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Microsoft's Bishop said that in the near-future, AI systems will likely be trained using a mix of human-led, supervised learning and unsupervised learning. A common technique for teaching AI systems to perform these tricky tasks is by training them using a very large number of labeled examples. And there are many other forums, subReddits, and organizing platforms online, as well. "Every company that has an interest in automating a service has access to or uses some sort of platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered? Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school.

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered? Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school.