2026-06-03
47 分钟第 135 季 第 1 集
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It's 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya.
A data labeler clocks in for his shift and lets out a heavy sigh.
He does not want to be here this morning.
He walks into a large room lined with rows of workers tapping away at computer terminals.
He logs in, opens a program, and starts to watch a woman get undressed.
She seems totally unaware that anyone might be viewing her.
But this data worker can see everything because the video is being streamed
live from a pair of Meta glasses sitting on her nightstand a continent away.
The Kenyan man works for a data labeling company called Sama, a corporation
that supplies the human labor behind the so-called autonomous machine learning at the heart of AI.
Every day in 10-hour shifts, his job is to review unfiltered video content
and label what he sees by drawing bounding boxes around the images on the screen.
He draws one box around a cluster of pixels and labels it a lamp.
He draws another box and labels that a bookcase.
He's training the AI to recognize everyday items so the algorithm can get better at doing it in the future.
The labeling work is low-paid and repetitive, but that isn't the worst part.
Because this man doesn't just see lamps in bookcases.
He often finds himself reviewing sensitive or graphic video content, like the woman undressing.