Il 14 giugno scorso, Florian Schmidt, professore di design all'Università di Scienze Applicate di Dresda, aveva presentato la relazione conclusiva del nostro convegno INDL-1 "Microwork Platforms". Il tema del suo intervento era il mercato del data training nel settore automobilistico europeo e internazionale. La sua presentazione si basava sui dati di un progetto finanziato dalla Fondazione Hans Böckler. Il rapporto finale del progetto è ora disponibile in inglese e io ne consiglio caldamente la lettura a tutt* quell* che vogliono saperne di più sui lavoratori dell'ombra che insegnano alle auto "senza guidatore" a distinguere un albero da un pedone. https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_fofoe_WP_155_2019.pdf "The self-driving car depends on so-called self-learning algorithms, which require large amounts of “training data”. The production of this training data or “ground truth data” requires vast amounts of manual labour in data annotation, performed by crowdworkers across the globe. The crowdworkers both train AI systems and are trained by AI systems. Humans and machines work together in ever more complex structures. An end of this work is not in sight; according to interviews with experts conducted for the study, the demand for this type of labour will continue to grow rapidly in the foreseeable future. However, as the study also shows, while this type of labour creates a new class of skilled crowdworkers, the precariousness of this work remains high because individual tasks are continuously under threat either of being automated or of being further outsourced to an even cheaper region in the world. As the study shows, 2018 saw an influx of hundreds of thousands of crowd-workers from Venezuela specialising in these tasks. On some new platforms, this group now makes up 75 per cent of the workforce. These recent geographical shifts in the supply of labour are a symptom of deeper structural changes within the crowdsourcing industry." -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor (HDR), Telecom Paris (Paris School of Telecommunications) Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society