Unknown Label

Unknown Label is an experimental documentary project which will investigate the power asymmetries and neocolonial exploitation involved in the training of autonomous cars. The film will start with a service of autonomous taxis within a gated community of wealthy retirees in Florida, USA. The service was run by a startup and it operated between 2018 and 2021 when it was acquired by another company and the service was shutdown. In 2018, when the tests began in the USA, a terrible economic crisis struck Venezuela and thus a lot of people there lost their job and had to rely to online gig work to survive the hyperinflation. Many of them ended up labelling images used to train self-driving cars in the Global North. My film will take a thorough and critical look at how the service was marketed and used and put that in contrast to the process of training the AI of the cars, thus asking what is the global cost for so-called “disruptive” technologies ?