6 ms·

Inside Amazon's clickworker platform

140 points by jsrn 10y ago

blazespin 10y ago
It'll be interesting to watch AI start edging out these jobs. What an interesting general AI project. Instead of a Turk, there will be a machine inside..
- joncp 10y ago
  That's almost certainly Amazon's endgame.
- simonbw 10y ago
  Would their new slogan be Artificial Artificial Artificial intelligence?
- RandomInteger4 10y ago
  That would be weird. Some of the tasks on there now are for labeling training data for AIs ...
- duaneb 10y ago
  No you misunderstand, this is horizontally scalable humanity. This is how you bootstrap training models.
- avaid1996 10y ago
  Don't know if this would really happen much, unless we are saturated with labelled datasets. They are used for labelling and not directly responsible for the actual end classficiation which is what AI is aiming to solve. In fact, AI needs labelling to work on these classficiations
  - visarga 10y ago
    classfic[i]ations /Just a human doing a spellbot's job.
    - sharmi 10y ago
      class[i]fic[i]ations /Just another human doing a human's job doing a spellbot's job Makes you wonder about the quality of the job done on MechanicalTurk. Redoing supposedly done work is my worst nightmare.
      - visarga 10y ago
        Haha this is priceless. :-) Thanks
- Asooka 10y ago
  Might be worth it if you have a super smart AI that is very slow to use its predictions to train a very fast highly specialised neural net. Also, the whole thing makes me think of the original plot of The Matrix - the one where humans are used as co-processors rather than very inefficient organic batteries. The Wachowskis stated that at the time they thought people wouldn't understand the former, so they went with the latter. Today I can absolutely picture farms of people born in pods living in virtual reality where everyone has the equivalent of an AMT job and nobody finds it weird that you're paid to solve made-up problems because duh, everyone does that. Maybe at first 80% of people would work in some sort of management job so the machines can learn how to manage people and then gradually displace them.
tie_ 10y ago
It's a global platform for cheap human labor. I find it completely unsurprising that living off cheap labor alone would not result in a particularly good living standard, especially not in some of the most expensive locations in the world, and especially not when competing with cheap labor from across the globe.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  I'm always torn when I see stories like this. On one hand I feel for someone making less than minimum wage doing a job, but on the other I realize that these people are competing with people who come from places without a minimum wage at all. The same thing happens on freelancer sites. Jobs for pennies on the dollar of their worth are fought over by people barely making it in the US, and people who are enjoying a rather livable stream of income in other countries. To me the answer is to tell yourself that it's not work but a hobby that happens to pay, and at least seek out work that pays minimum wage in your area, if that applies. But easier said than done I'm sure.
  - dx034 10y ago
    And they compete with people living in much cheaper prices. $5/hr isn't a living wage in the US, but it very well is in many parts of India. So there are many people who can well compete at these levels because they can live from it.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    > but on the other I realize that these people are competing with people who come from places without a minimum wage at all. "Places", or "countries" might have low minimum wage compared to US or even below the average of world. But no minimum wage at all seems unlikely. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count... I wonder if there is a 18+ check involved. > To me the answer is to tell yourself that it's not work but a hobby that happens to pay, and at least seek out work that pays minimum wage in your area, if that applies. But it isn't a hobby; it is paid; hence work. From Wikipedia: "A Hobby is a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time." The type of labour on Amazon Turk is extremely repetitive just like (physical) hard labour. The goal also isn't pleasure, and the income isn't a gift; it is part of one's income (I wonder if it is being tracked though). I also find the name Amazon Turk offensive. I am aware that the word Turk has multiple meanings, but in a good part of the 90s in Europe cheap labour and Turkish people went hand in hand. It was the kind of labour the native Europeans didn't want to do (e.g. garbagemen), it paid very badly. Now we are at the next step of globalisation and because the competition goes via the Internet the lowest common denominator becomes standard. Which is very bad for those who are unemployed, underskilled, homeless etc in higher civilized countries where the standard of living is higher, but so is things like rent. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to pay my rent with Amazon Turk. > The same thing happens on freelancer sites. Jobs for pennies on the dollar of their worth are fought over by people barely making it in the US, and people who are enjoying a rather livable stream of income in other countries. Yes, and fake freelance like Uber and MLM.
eva1984 10y ago
Shit job or no job. That is a question. And probably one should not ask Amazon for answer.
siliconc0w 10y ago
Amazon could bundle Turk with it's other AI efforts to automatically train AIs alongside Turk problems to eventually take over the task or only farm it out when the model's confidence is outside a particular threshold.
- twblalock 10y ago
  A lot of companies do that already, for machine learning dataset training.
Sanddancer 10y ago
My mother had a job like this 30 years ago. She worked data entry as a keypunch operator. However, it was a full time job, above minimum wage, provided insurance and vacation time. Mechanical Turk relies on the race to the bottom, the fact that some people need any job to keep from being on the street. Of course companies love the gig economy, it keeps them from having to think of their workers as people.
- Erik816 10y ago
  Alternative interpretation: 30 years ago this kind of job could't easily be done by someone in a third world country for a fraction of the price. Now that it can, the price has adjusted.
  - PostOnce 10y ago
    Out of sight, out of mind. It's not like those people have the same standard of living but just with lower living costs. You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US. Plus you're not bound by the same labor laws if you hire from overseas, only public outrage if the public ever finds out. edit: that is to say, instead of thinking of it as "the price has adjusted", we can think of it as "greed is no longer constrained by the difficulty of overseas communication". Our laws can't contain greed, if we can just export it to where we have no jurisdiction.
    - wjossey 10y ago
      > You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US. Nah, sorry. That's just over the top and not true. I worked two separate minimum wage jobs before I was 20, and both had owner / operators who made no where near that kind of money. One was an entrepreneur who was losing money every year, but believed he had a good product that could grow with franchises (and it did). The other ended up having his collection of businesses go under due to Netflix (they were video stores). Minimum wage does not imply improperly priced labor. While it is not a living wage in much of the United States, to assume it is purely exploitive is also an overdramatized statement. I'm not exceptionally well versed in minimum wage theory, so my opinions are based on listening to numerous Econtalk podcasts on the subject (https://goo.gl/IbKS1F https://goo.gl/IbKS1F). Some argue for an elimination of the minimum wage, others for a vast expansion at the federal level, others for a broader expansion at the state level. My personal observation is that the minimum wage discussion is interesting, but mostly just the tip of the ice berg and serves as more of a distraction around more meaningful conversations. 1. Minimum wage accounts for less than 2% of the hourly workforce in the United States (https://goo.gl/Q9S2Mf https://goo.gl/Q9S2Mf). Looking at it on a state by state basis, that number increases; however, let's focus on the federal wage for now. 2. There are more than seven times more people in the United States (14M+) who are either unemployed (seeking but can't find work) or underemployed (have work, but are seeking more) :: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709 3. There are over 60M Americans who work hourly jobs in the United States, and 4.6M will have to find new work each year due to regular turnover in the market (I don't have my citations handy for this one, have it in a document that is missing the citation, but I'm confident on the figure). For a worker working 32 hours at the 8.25 minimum wage, they can expect to make $264 / week. Give them a 10% raise, and they're at $9.075, or $290.40 / week. Or, alternatively, let's give that worker better access to full employment, and they reach 40 hours, but only make $8.25 / hour, or $330 / week. Given an average number of weeks of 52.1429 per year our example workers can expect to make: Fully Employed Minimum Wage: $17,207.15 Under Employed Higher Wage: $15,142.29 In this very simple example (with some assumptions that are admittedly contrived), the fully employed minimum wage worker is in fact, better off. They are still impoverished, they still have a tough life and will not be able to have many luxuries; however, full employment, in this example, is more optimal when purely looking at salary. Full employment, mixed with increasing wages, and decreasing prices of goods and services, is the combination we should all be striving for.
drieddust 10y ago
Amazon is setting a wrong precedence which others are following[1]. When Bezos says "Your Margin is my opportunity.", he fails to mention who will be the loser. They have started a race to bottom which means employees/workers will be squeezed until their bones are dry. I think this can be fixed simply by measuring companies on employment they generate and median tax payed per employee apart from the corporate tax. If they fall behind on these metrics, their products should be taxed heavily. If companies don't agree, they lose access to the market which will allow for local responsible companies to emerge and compete. I am just wondering if my thinking is simplistic or this is a problem our leadership does not want to solve this issue? [1] http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sign-here-please-the-life-of-a-delivery-boy.html http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sig... edit: grammer
- bgirard 10y ago
  It's an interesting idea. In practice I bet it would push business for more automation and to for splitting into a highly profitable R&D entity with highly payed workers and 'independent' contracting firms that are barely profitable under which low wage employees would work under.
  - drieddust 10y ago
    I really want to put more thoughts into this so your input is appreciated. Not to nitpick but what you described is happening today. If companies are measured on all of the metric then I how do they escape. If they move their work to contracting firms, won't they also be evaluated on the same metrics.
  - deepnotderp 10y ago
    Wouldn't the first outcome be a preferable scenario?
  - visarga 10y ago
    Same as with cleaning services - used to be part of large corporations, but it now is subcontracted to a different company with the purpose of paying lower wages, ability to fire people at will / or the whole service company.
kozikow 10y ago
In my company I have my own image labeling team in Poland and I pay $4 per hour. I can go down to $2.5. Median hourly rate of amazon mechanical turk is supposedly $1.38[1]. My dataset is harder to label than ordinary images, so it takes a few hours to ramp up the labeller. I have been contemplating migrating to mechanical turk for a while. Anyone have some experience to share? 1. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2167702612469015 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/216770261246901...
- IanCal 10y ago
  Is it a major cost to your business? Would it be a large risk if things went badly? Also, does your current setup have any problems (perhaps scaling)? If the answers are no, yes, no then I'd not change a thing. Otherwise perhaps look at using Turk for labeling and your working crew as reviewers. It may only take a small number of badly labeled images to cost more than you save.
- pranaygupta 10y ago
  you may want to try out Squadrun. Their quality is pretty high and they are typically faster and cheaper than MT. https://squadrun.co/ https://squadrun.co/
johnnabil 10y ago
I am confused, i checked most of the HITs and most of them are paying less than 1$ , is that true? will i work for 1 hour for 0.04$?
soufron 10y ago
I would not call it "being paid".
JackFr 10y ago
If I close my eyes and imagine a world where Mechanical Turk doesn't exist, it's not clear to me how the people in the article are better off.
- dx034 10y ago
  Just look away from the US. Turk is not available in Europe (although other systems are).
zaroth 10y ago
75% of Turkers are Americans. And I didn't see it in the OP but I would guess that similarly 75% of companies issuing HITs are American. Now I don't know the exact wording of minimum wage law, but I'm pretty sure if you hire an independent contractor through a 3rd party staffing company, let's say to clean houses. And then you set a fixed price on the service, say you will pay $20 for each house cleaned, knowing it takes 4 hours on average to clean a house. And then you let anyone who wants it take the job. This would be illegal. So, I honestly don't know how mTurk is allowed to operate the way they do. American companies should not be able to hire American workers to perform labor at below minimum wage, just because they use an API to do it. I'm willing to bet if someone was willing to spell it all out in front of the right AG or the right class action legal team that there would be significant settlements to be had.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  lots of companies do it. look at farm workers or car washes or -- allegedly -- amazon's very own warehouses. not to mention the overseas factories that build everything they sell. there's a whole section of society that minimum wage laws simply don't apply to and everyone looks the other way while enjoying the benefits. someone like bezos basically just enjoys complete non-accountability and even high praise and wealth for putting an api in front of literally everything he can think of, including illegal labor practices.
- mtw 10y ago
  From what I understand, most of the american turkers are stay-at-home moms. They have a family to cater to and various obligations that prevent them to pursue a full-time job. Mechanical Turk gives them the possibility to work anytime, at their own rhytm. 10mn there, 2 hours, early am, middle of the night. I'm not sure if there are jobs that can offer this flexibility.
  - wslh 10y ago
    Just check how much you can do in Mechanical Turk and you would find that is basically zero. It would be good to calculate what is the price of this work in other markets to know if this is fair trade, fair labor.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
What a dystopian vibe. They were debating how long this type of work would be available, but didn't emphasize that ultimately it's a zero sum game. Is anyone predicting when various jobs will fall to AI? I here about the 3 million truck drivers a lot. However I think some groups like radiologists are still underestimating the speed at which reading x-rays will become mostly a job of double checking computer interpretations.
novaleaf 10y ago
A bit of anecdotal insight: I have a relative who is psychologically incapable of finding a job due to fear of rejection, and will justify not applying for any job by considering how hard it would be to get a job. Quite literally he finds it more attractive to get a guaranteed minimum wage job than to apply and face possible rejection for a high paid job which he is qualified for. I believe this same kind of pathological behavior is what's causing people (like described in the article) to stick with AMT jobs. I wish I knew a way to break this vicious cycle :(

140 points by jsrn 10y ago

It'll be interesting to watch AI start edging out these jobs. What an interesting general AI project. Instead of a Turk, there will be a machine inside..

joncp 10y ago
That's almost certainly Amazon's endgame.
simonbw 10y ago
Would their new slogan be Artificial Artificial Artificial intelligence?
RandomInteger4 10y ago
That would be weird. Some of the tasks on there now are for labeling training data for AIs ...
duaneb 10y ago
No you misunderstand, this is horizontally scalable humanity. This is how you bootstrap training models.
avaid1996 10y ago
Don't know if this would really happen much, unless we are saturated with labelled datasets. They are used for labelling and not directly responsible for the actual end classficiation which is what AI is aiming to solve. In fact, AI needs labelling to work on these classficiations
- visarga 10y ago
  classfic[i]ations /Just a human doing a spellbot's job.
  - sharmi 10y ago
    class[i]fic[i]ations /Just another human doing a human's job doing a spellbot's job Makes you wonder about the quality of the job done on MechanicalTurk. Redoing supposedly done work is my worst nightmare.
    - visarga 10y ago
      Haha this is priceless. :-) Thanks
Asooka 10y ago
Might be worth it if you have a super smart AI that is very slow to use its predictions to train a very fast highly specialised neural net. Also, the whole thing makes me think of the original plot of The Matrix - the one where humans are used as co-processors rather than very inefficient organic batteries. The Wachowskis stated that at the time they thought people wouldn't understand the former, so they went with the latter. Today I can absolutely picture farms of people born in pods living in virtual reality where everyone has the equivalent of an AMT job and nobody finds it weird that you're paid to solve made-up problems because duh, everyone does that. Maybe at first 80% of people would work in some sort of management job so the machines can learn how to manage people and then gradually displace them.

tie_ 10y ago

It's a global platform for cheap human labor. I find it completely unsurprising that living off cheap labor alone would not result in a particularly good living standard, especially not in some of the most expensive locations in the world, and especially not when competing with cheap labor from across the globe.

BoorishBears 10y ago
I'm always torn when I see stories like this. On one hand I feel for someone making less than minimum wage doing a job, but on the other I realize that these people are competing with people who come from places without a minimum wage at all. The same thing happens on freelancer sites. Jobs for pennies on the dollar of their worth are fought over by people barely making it in the US, and people who are enjoying a rather livable stream of income in other countries. To me the answer is to tell yourself that it's not work but a hobby that happens to pay, and at least seek out work that pays minimum wage in your area, if that applies. But easier said than done I'm sure.
- dx034 10y ago
  And they compete with people living in much cheaper prices. $5/hr isn't a living wage in the US, but it very well is in many parts of India. So there are many people who can well compete at these levels because they can live from it.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > but on the other I realize that these people are competing with people who come from places without a minimum wage at all. "Places", or "countries" might have low minimum wage compared to US or even below the average of world. But no minimum wage at all seems unlikely. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count... I wonder if there is a 18+ check involved. > To me the answer is to tell yourself that it's not work but a hobby that happens to pay, and at least seek out work that pays minimum wage in your area, if that applies. But it isn't a hobby; it is paid; hence work. From Wikipedia: "A Hobby is a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time." The type of labour on Amazon Turk is extremely repetitive just like (physical) hard labour. The goal also isn't pleasure, and the income isn't a gift; it is part of one's income (I wonder if it is being tracked though). I also find the name Amazon Turk offensive. I am aware that the word Turk has multiple meanings, but in a good part of the 90s in Europe cheap labour and Turkish people went hand in hand. It was the kind of labour the native Europeans didn't want to do (e.g. garbagemen), it paid very badly. Now we are at the next step of globalisation and because the competition goes via the Internet the lowest common denominator becomes standard. Which is very bad for those who are unemployed, underskilled, homeless etc in higher civilized countries where the standard of living is higher, but so is things like rent. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to pay my rent with Amazon Turk. > The same thing happens on freelancer sites. Jobs for pennies on the dollar of their worth are fought over by people barely making it in the US, and people who are enjoying a rather livable stream of income in other countries. Yes, and fake freelance like Uber and MLM.

eva1984 10y ago

Shit job or no job. That is a question. And probably one should not ask Amazon for answer.

siliconc0w 10y ago

Amazon could bundle Turk with it's other AI efforts to automatically train AIs alongside Turk problems to eventually take over the task or only farm it out when the model's confidence is outside a particular threshold.

twblalock 10y ago
A lot of companies do that already, for machine learning dataset training.

Sanddancer 10y ago

My mother had a job like this 30 years ago. She worked data entry as a keypunch operator. However, it was a full time job, above minimum wage, provided insurance and vacation time. Mechanical Turk relies on the race to the bottom, the fact that some people need any job to keep from being on the street. Of course companies love the gig economy, it keeps them from having to think of their workers as people.

Erik816 10y ago
Alternative interpretation: 30 years ago this kind of job could't easily be done by someone in a third world country for a fraction of the price. Now that it can, the price has adjusted.
- PostOnce 10y ago
  Out of sight, out of mind. It's not like those people have the same standard of living but just with lower living costs. You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US. Plus you're not bound by the same labor laws if you hire from overseas, only public outrage if the public ever finds out. edit: that is to say, instead of thinking of it as "the price has adjusted", we can think of it as "greed is no longer constrained by the difficulty of overseas communication". Our laws can't contain greed, if we can just export it to where we have no jurisdiction.
  - wjossey 10y ago
    > You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US. Nah, sorry. That's just over the top and not true. I worked two separate minimum wage jobs before I was 20, and both had owner / operators who made no where near that kind of money. One was an entrepreneur who was losing money every year, but believed he had a good product that could grow with franchises (and it did). The other ended up having his collection of businesses go under due to Netflix (they were video stores). Minimum wage does not imply improperly priced labor. While it is not a living wage in much of the United States, to assume it is purely exploitive is also an overdramatized statement. I'm not exceptionally well versed in minimum wage theory, so my opinions are based on listening to numerous Econtalk podcasts on the subject (https://goo.gl/IbKS1F https://goo.gl/IbKS1F). Some argue for an elimination of the minimum wage, others for a vast expansion at the federal level, others for a broader expansion at the state level. My personal observation is that the minimum wage discussion is interesting, but mostly just the tip of the ice berg and serves as more of a distraction around more meaningful conversations. 1. Minimum wage accounts for less than 2% of the hourly workforce in the United States (https://goo.gl/Q9S2Mf https://goo.gl/Q9S2Mf). Looking at it on a state by state basis, that number increases; however, let's focus on the federal wage for now. 2. There are more than seven times more people in the United States (14M+) who are either unemployed (seeking but can't find work) or underemployed (have work, but are seeking more) :: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709 3. There are over 60M Americans who work hourly jobs in the United States, and 4.6M will have to find new work each year due to regular turnover in the market (I don't have my citations handy for this one, have it in a document that is missing the citation, but I'm confident on the figure). For a worker working 32 hours at the 8.25 minimum wage, they can expect to make $264 / week. Give them a 10% raise, and they're at $9.075, or $290.40 / week. Or, alternatively, let's give that worker better access to full employment, and they reach 40 hours, but only make $8.25 / hour, or $330 / week. Given an average number of weeks of 52.1429 per year our example workers can expect to make: Fully Employed Minimum Wage: $17,207.15 Under Employed Higher Wage: $15,142.29 In this very simple example (with some assumptions that are admittedly contrived), the fully employed minimum wage worker is in fact, better off. They are still impoverished, they still have a tough life and will not be able to have many luxuries; however, full employment, in this example, is more optimal when purely looking at salary. Full employment, mixed with increasing wages, and decreasing prices of goods and services, is the combination we should all be striving for.

drieddust 10y ago

Amazon is setting a wrong precedence which others are following[1]. When Bezos says "Your Margin is my opportunity.", he fails to mention who will be the loser. They have started a race to bottom which means employees/workers will be squeezed until their bones are dry. I think this can be fixed simply by measuring companies on employment they generate and median tax payed per employee apart from the corporate tax. If they fall behind on these metrics, their products should be taxed heavily. If companies don't agree, they lose access to the market which will allow for local responsible companies to emerge and compete. I am just wondering if my thinking is simplistic or this is a problem our leadership does not want to solve this issue? [1] http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sign-here-please-the-life-of-a-delivery-boy.html http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sig... edit: grammer

bgirard 10y ago
It's an interesting idea. In practice I bet it would push business for more automation and to for splitting into a highly profitable R&D entity with highly payed workers and 'independent' contracting firms that are barely profitable under which low wage employees would work under.
- drieddust 10y ago
  I really want to put more thoughts into this so your input is appreciated. Not to nitpick but what you described is happening today. If companies are measured on all of the metric then I how do they escape. If they move their work to contracting firms, won't they also be evaluated on the same metrics.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  Wouldn't the first outcome be a preferable scenario?
- visarga 10y ago
  Same as with cleaning services - used to be part of large corporations, but it now is subcontracted to a different company with the purpose of paying lower wages, ability to fire people at will / or the whole service company.

kozikow 10y ago

In my company I have my own image labeling team in Poland and I pay $4 per hour. I can go down to $2.5. Median hourly rate of amazon mechanical turk is supposedly $1.38[1]. My dataset is harder to label than ordinary images, so it takes a few hours to ramp up the labeller. I have been contemplating migrating to mechanical turk for a while. Anyone have some experience to share? 1. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2167702612469015 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/216770261246901...

IanCal 10y ago
Is it a major cost to your business? Would it be a large risk if things went badly? Also, does your current setup have any problems (perhaps scaling)? If the answers are no, yes, no then I'd not change a thing. Otherwise perhaps look at using Turk for labeling and your working crew as reviewers. It may only take a small number of badly labeled images to cost more than you save.
pranaygupta 10y ago
you may want to try out Squadrun. Their quality is pretty high and they are typically faster and cheaper than MT. https://squadrun.co/ https://squadrun.co/

johnnabil 10y ago

I am confused, i checked most of the HITs and most of them are paying less than 1$ , is that true? will i work for 1 hour for 0.04$?

soufron 10y ago

I would not call it "being paid".

JackFr 10y ago

If I close my eyes and imagine a world where Mechanical Turk doesn't exist, it's not clear to me how the people in the article are better off.

dx034 10y ago
Just look away from the US. Turk is not available in Europe (although other systems are).

zaroth 10y ago

75% of Turkers are Americans. And I didn't see it in the OP but I would guess that similarly 75% of companies issuing HITs are American. Now I don't know the exact wording of minimum wage law, but I'm pretty sure if you hire an independent contractor through a 3rd party staffing company, let's say to clean houses. And then you set a fixed price on the service, say you will pay $20 for each house cleaned, knowing it takes 4 hours on average to clean a house. And then you let anyone who wants it take the job. This would be illegal. So, I honestly don't know how mTurk is allowed to operate the way they do. American companies should not be able to hire American workers to perform labor at below minimum wage, just because they use an API to do it. I'm willing to bet if someone was willing to spell it all out in front of the right AG or the right class action legal team that there would be significant settlements to be had.

beachstartup 10y ago
lots of companies do it. look at farm workers or car washes or -- allegedly -- amazon's very own warehouses. not to mention the overseas factories that build everything they sell. there's a whole section of society that minimum wage laws simply don't apply to and everyone looks the other way while enjoying the benefits. someone like bezos basically just enjoys complete non-accountability and even high praise and wealth for putting an api in front of literally everything he can think of, including illegal labor practices.
mtw 10y ago
From what I understand, most of the american turkers are stay-at-home moms. They have a family to cater to and various obligations that prevent them to pursue a full-time job. Mechanical Turk gives them the possibility to work anytime, at their own rhytm. 10mn there, 2 hours, early am, middle of the night. I'm not sure if there are jobs that can offer this flexibility.
- wslh 10y ago
  Just check how much you can do in Mechanical Turk and you would find that is basically zero. It would be good to calculate what is the price of this work in other markets to know if this is fair trade, fair labor.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

What a dystopian vibe. They were debating how long this type of work would be available, but didn't emphasize that ultimately it's a zero sum game. Is anyone predicting when various jobs will fall to AI? I here about the 3 million truck drivers a lot. However I think some groups like radiologists are still underestimating the speed at which reading x-rays will become mostly a job of double checking computer interpretations.

novaleaf 10y ago

A bit of anecdotal insight: I have a relative who is psychologically incapable of finding a job due to fear of rejection, and will justify not applying for any job by considering how hard it would be to get a job. Quite literally he finds it more attractive to get a guaranteed minimum wage job than to apply and face possible rejection for a high paid job which he is qualified for. I believe this same kind of pathological behavior is what's causing people (like described in the article) to stick with AMT jobs. I wish I knew a way to break this vicious cycle :(