I’ve just been offered a ‘side hussle’ on LinkedIn as an AI trainer* . They’re looking for ‘smart folks’ who have a Bachelor’s degree in physics or maths, and suggest it can be my ‘newest side gig’** and ‘earn $1,600 weekly (£1,990 or 1920 €) with projects starting at $40 per hour (£33 or 48 €).
As one of those ‘smart folks’ I thought I’d do the maths, and show, in my writing, what is real.
To get $1,600 I would need to work 40 hours. Let’s assume my ‘main job’ is also 40 hours and that I’m up most days from 6am to 10pm. That’s 112 hours a week. If I spent; 6 hours a week travelling to and from work, 2 hours a day preparing and eating food, 1 hour a week shopping.. and 1.5 hours a day getting up, dressed, showered, and ready for bed… and expecting everyone to hang out without me, I’d have half an hour left.
This is a side job in the same way that the English Channel*** is an easy swim. In fact, you have as much chance of getting a regular smart employed person to take this as a side gig as getting Trump to invite Kendrick Lamar to the White House for afternoon tea.
However, there is a type of smart person I can imagine who would enjoy spending a few hours a week inventing intricate problems in inductive, deductive, physical, temporal or spatial reasoning. That’s the same type of person who likes inventing sudoku or crosswords or just coding in their home alone… and that’s the crunch. Because any AI trained purely by this type of person will acquire their cognitive biases and dissonances, neurotypical hangups and any other random Muskian social disfunctions that might come too.
Everything is becoming science fictional. The Singularity Sky - when it comes - is not going to be pretty. In the words of Joseph Heller; “So it goes.”
-
-
-
* they don’t call it an AI trainer. They call it a ‘consultant to evaluate AI logic and solve programs to improve the quality of each model’
** Exactly how many ‘side gigs’ do they think a body can have? If they seriously expect their consultants to hit $1,600 per week there’s literally one hour a week left, should the ‘smart person’ be sufficiently desperate to take on a third ‘side gig’.
*** La Manche, Armelkanal, Mor Udd, That water between Engerlaynd and You-rope.
Either Firefox doesn't understand how shoulders work, or that sea was choppy enough to rearrange the swimmers arms. Can Firefox AI work the side job for you? Then the AIs will be taking our taking our jobs jobs.
Presumably they pay you that money for a hot minute and then once AI is ‘trained’ you rejoin the masses on minimum wage because the AI is now doing everyone’s job?