Kiwibots, the “parallel autonomy” food delivery bots popular with students at UC Berkeley, are remotely piloted by workers in Colombia who are paid $2/hour
Karis Tang, age 2½, squealed with excitement when she saw a Kiwibot rolling through Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley. Tweets: @rikabel , @matthewbevan , @harrysiegel , @matthewbevan , @mariafarrell , @jakebackpack , @simoncarless , @ruchowdh , and @sub8u Tweets: Rik Abel / @rikabel : The future of AI delivery robots is Colombians paid $2 an hour to do the way finding. Paging @timmaughan, again. https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Matt Bevan / @matthewbevan : (Colombians are being paid $2/hr to drive three delivery robots at once) Harry Siegel / @harrysiegel : “College campuses are the perfect playground,” Iatsenia said. ""Without robots, they'd eat ramen all day." https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/yEEFAkUPCt Matt Bevan / @matthewbevan : So Silicon Valley has figured out how to pay food delivery people $0.66 an hour. Great work. https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Maria Farrell / @mariafarrell : Thread pointing out how fauxtomation drives inequality because the behind-the-scenes humans doing the work needed for “AI” to look like AI are invisible and increasingly unimaginable; we don't see them so we don't feel for them and that helps them be exploited. Perceptive. https://twitter.com/... Jacob Bacharach / @jakebackpack : Put a pin in this one. Remember when I told you all back in March to keep an eye on the Autonomous Vehicle space, that commercial AV and robotics were shaping up as a Theranos-style con job? https://twitter.com/... Simon Carless / @simoncarless : Uh wait, so the ‘cute’ delivery bots carrying food you sometimes see in Berkeley don't use AI for navigation - each one is being piloted remotely from Colombia? Boggle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Rumman Chowdhury / @ruchowdh : The bifurcated economy - our tech driven world of the privileged people who benefit from “automation” and the mostly invisible servant class driving it - has three parts: (thread) https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... Subrahmanyam Kvj / @sub8u : Every automation tech that claims to use AI and claims to be fully autonomous is:1) either lying outright, and/or2) has actual outsourced low-wage human workers running the service.We get the “AI” at the pace we want!https://www.sfchronicle.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...