[Podcast] DiPLab’s Antonio Casilli on RAI Radio 3: When Daily Life Becomes Data

DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli was invited to speak on Pillole di Eta Beta, the technology programme broadcast on Italy’s RAI Radio 3, in an episode that opens with a striking new phenomenon: in Los Angeles, people are being paid to simply live their lives on camera.

Wearing body-mounted cameras and sensor bracelets, workers film themselves doing household chores. Thousands of US workers have already been recruited for this work, paid a few dozen dollars for hours of first-person footage that becomes raw material for the next generation of autonomous machines.

For Casilli, what is unfolding in Los Angeles is the latest iteration of a phenomenon that has involved millions of workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for over a decade: training algorithms, labeling images, moderating content. A digital proletariat that the technology industry systematically erases from its triumphant narrative. And yet without it, none of its products would function.

The episode also raises a harder question about users. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, recently sold 30 billion video sequences, captured from players navigating the real world through augmented reality, to a robotics delivery company. Millions of people filmed streets, parks, and shops without knowing their footage would end up training autonomous delivery systems.