Even artificial intelligence needs help

SITTING in front of a computer, Wang Hongmei, 23, carefully examines a picture on the screen and marks up the cars in the image using rectangles of different sizes.

Wang is hard at work helping artificial intelligence to understand our world. She is an AI curator, who helps sort and mark up key information on the images for AI to better understand them.

As people worry more about machines taking jobs from humans, Wang is benefiting from the technologies and helping improve the lives of her poverty-stricken family.

According to a 2018 report from the World Economic Forum called “The Future of Jobs 2018,” machines and algorithms in the workplace are expected to cause 75 million jobs to be displaced by 2022, but at the same time create 133 million new roles.

“I never imagined I would be doing an AI-related job,” Wang said. “It’s completely new and quite a fresh experience.”

Battling poverty

In July, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba worked with the China Women’s Development Foundation to launch the “A-Idol Initiative” to bring AIrelated jobs to people, women in particular, in underdeveloped areas in China.

Wang’s family of six used to live in a poverty-stricken mountain village some 200 kilometers away from the city of Tongren in southwest China’s Guizhou Province and has been recently relocated to the city under a government program aimed to battle poverty.

The local government is also working with the “A-Idol Initiative.” Participants like Wang are entitled to free training courses on labeling and curating data, knowledge key to machine learning and the development of AI.

It took Wang around 10 days to finish the training and pass a standardized assessment to become an AI curator.

“The training was challenging at first, but the more I keep at it, the easier it gets,” Wang said.

The Alibaba AI Labs have designed a set of professional qualifications so that the skills acquired by participants through the initiative can be even more widely marketable.

Wang earns around 3,000 yuan (US$425) per month from the job, higher than her previous job working as a kindergarten teacher. More importantly, she lives closer to her family than before so she can better take care of them.

Alibaba AI Labs said it will commit orders worth at least 10 million yuan annually to ensure the sustainability of the project.

Many people in Wang’s community have also participated in the initiative to work as AI curators.

(Xinhua)