India’s Uber drivers are going to play a part in helping bring self-driving cars on the road.
Uber has begun letting its Indian driver partners complete data labeling and other tasks when they aren’t driving their cars. These tasks earn drivers additional income, and Uber has partnered with companies in industries such as generative artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, tech and startups to provide data-labelling services. There are 1.4 million Uber drivers in India, and they will have an option to label data. Uber’s data labeling service is live in a dozen Indian cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, and smaller cities like Pune, Bhopal, Vizag and Jaipur.
“Uber AI Solutions is piloting a programme in 12 cities across India that allows drivers to boost their earnings by completing digital tasks directly in the Uber app. Until now, in India and other countries, these tasks such as labelling work, text classification, object counting, and receipt digitisation were completed by independent contractors outside the app,” Megha Yethadka, global head at Uber AI Solutions, told ET.
“Uber AI Solutions supports global companies with services like data labelling, localisation, and product testing, the essential building blocks of high-performing AI. Insights from the India pilot will inform how Uber scales this kind of work to drivers and delivery partners elsewhere in the world,” she added.
Data labeling is one of the less-talked about aspects of the AI revolution. Top AI model companies use human labelers to create synthetic data to train AI models. Companies like Scale AI and Surge hire contractors in places like Kenya and Venezuela, and asked them to write answers that are used to fine-tune AI models. There are also other data labeling tasks, such as identifying objects on roads, which are used by self-driving companies. Uber has partnered with autonomous vehicle maker Aurora, so it’s likely that Indian drivers will be labeling self-driving related data.
It’s an interesting idea. Uber already has a massive userbase of people who have its app and know how to drive. These people naturally take a lot of breaks when they’re waiting for rides, so Uber seems to think it could be a win-win to let them label data when they aren’t driving. These drivers will supplement their driving incomes, and help Uber label data for other companies that need such services. But there’s something slightly unsettling about the whole idea — if these drivers are indeed labeling data for self-driving companies, they’re helping create the very systems that will likely make their jobs redundant in the next couple of decades.