The Ghosts in the Self-Driving Machine

Self-driving cars are trained by artificial intelligence. But new research reveals a hidden human workforce essential to their development. These workers perform "data annotation." They view countless hours of road footage, manually labeling every object—pedestrians, signs, other cars. This tagged data is what teaches the AI to recognize the world. The job is often outsourced to gig workers in lower-wage countries. They work for hours identifying objects frame-by-frame. Experts say this human effort is the true foundation of autonomous vehicle technology. Without this large, unseen workforce, the self-driving industry could not advance. The cars may run on algorithms, but they are built on human labor.