Kenyans from "the toughest neighborhood on earth" trace pixels all day to train autonomous vehicles

The Nairobi neighborhood of Kibera is Africa's largest slum, and it's home to an unlikely, Silicon-Valley-style tech park operated by Samasource (motto: "Artificial intelligence meets human dignity"), who serves clients from Google to Microsoft to Salesforce, using clickworkers who get paid $9/day, compared to the going wage of $2/day in the region's "informal economy" (the company believes that paying wages on par with rich-world clickworkers would "distort the local economy").

One major project at Samasource's Kibera office is producing training data for self-driving cars: workers carefully trace pixel-accurate outlines around road-features like signs, cars, license plates, etc.

There are many ways in which Samsource benefits Kibera: workers are paid a living wage and enjoy better working conditions than are standard in Kibera, and women make up about half of the workforce, and can take 90 days' maternity leave and use a lactation room when they return. Workers who leave Samasource continue to thrive, pursuing higher education and/or "more formal work."

But the work is still unpleasant in ways that are familiar from other places where this kind of work is done, from the poor ergonomics to the worker metric tools that encourage workers to skip breaks in order to make quota (Samasource said it would re-evaluate the ergonomics).

More problematic is that Kibera's residents are unlikely to benefit from self-driving cars at any time in the foreseeable future -- while they could benefit from much lower-tech interventions, like clean water and sanitation.

Samasource is a really good example of both the possibilities and limitations of the economic development for "lifting people out of poverty." Kenya is a rich country with many natural resources that has struggled with the legacy of colonialism: much of the wealth of the former colonizers can be traced to extraction from Kenya, and today, those colonizing powers turn a blind eye to the laundering of the billions extracted from the region by corrupt officials and businesspeople. Read the rest