A recent Google Research paper gave an order-of-magnitude figure of “millions” with the potential to become “billions.”
So we could see a world where the (second, after farmer?) most common job is "AI annotator", if that's right. I guess the good news is that it's a remote option for a lot of very poor people in the third world that would have nothing otherwise.
An AI system might be capable of spotting cancer, he said, giving a hypothetical example, but only in a certain type of imagery from a certain type of machine; so now, you need a human to check that the AI is being fed the right type of data and maybe another human who checks its work before passing it to another AI that writes a report, which goes to another human, and so on. “AI doesn’t replace work,” he said. “But it does change how work is organized.”
Nobody's going to build a paperclip optimiser. Instead, we're going to build a bunch of investor, management and sales AIs, and then one day someone's accidentally going to create a loop where they end up being accountable only to themselves. Nobody will realise this until much later, because we'll all work for apps that tell us what to do with no context.
Edit, because this is a long-ass article:
“These days, we have become a bit cunning because we noticed that in other countries they are paying well,” said Victor, who was earning double the Kenyan rate by tasking in Malaysia. “You do it cautiously.”
Another Kenyan annotator said that after his account got suspended for mysterious reasons, he decided to stop playing by the rules. Now, he runs multiple accounts in multiple countries, tasking wherever the pay is best. He works fast and gets high marks for quality, he said, thanks to ChatGPT. The bot is wonderful, he said, letting him speed through $10 tasks in a matter of minutes. When we spoke, he was having it rate another chatbot’s responses according to seven different criteria, one AI training the other.
Oooh, that could be a big issue. Counterfeit training. There's no way the companies won't notice, but also no way to weed it out remotely.