Their eyes

The ubiquitous, ongoing discussions about machine learning and artificial intelligence and their impacts often leave out a crucial part of the equation – the cheap labour in the Global South that fuels these technologies. In his short documentaryTheir Eyes, the French filmmaker Nicolas Gourault spotlights the voices of several of these overlooked workers in Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela. Throughout, they explain the tasks they perform to train self-driving cars, as well as the mostly precarious and low-paid working conditions they endure. Peering into the screens of these gig workers, the audience experiences how they parse images of unfamiliar streets, performing repetitive tasks so that cars in another part of the world can ‘see’. As viewers ultimately step out of the workers’ screens and into their homes, the film questions who gets to benefit from these technologies and at what cost, highlighting how they perpetuate and widen existing geographical inequalities.