179 ms·

Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

137 points by chrmaury 15y ago

wtvanhest 15y ago
This would be a great kickstarter project. You may want to modify it though so the station just prints a check or some other instrument other than cash or you will end up with a lot of broken Mechanical Turk Stations.
- chrmaury 15y ago
  Yea, broken machines or people getting mugged right after cashing out are both concerns. But the people who would benefit most from something like this would be least likely to have a bank account.
  - dpres 15y ago
    Tons of businesses cash checks without a bank account. Another concern is kiosk hacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY
    - Professa 15y ago
      The kiosks actually coming up missing would be a bigger concern than hacking.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
shingen 15y ago
What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage. Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread. Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage. It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility. One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.
- jakeonthemove 15y ago
  People already work for less than minimum wage... if they can find a job! This would just bring more employment opportunities to those who need it.
- marshallp 15y ago
  So what you also need is more businesses to use mechanical turk or similar services. There's a huge opportunity in that for startups. The biggest is probably bridging the physical and digital worlds. Controlling robots through mechanical turk. Every factory robot, cnc machine, or 3d printer needs someone to keep an eye on it in case anything goes wrong so that the machine can get shut off. Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person. And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.
  - spindritf 15y ago
    > Controlling robots through mechanical turk. No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine. > And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best. Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.
    - marshallp 15y ago
      It's not as simple as that. It's not one poor guy looking a video feed or judging ads. It would be sophisticated system that pools together many workers in ways to get quality. So, for example, if the factory robot knocks something over, and there are 10 different people watching a few frames of video, it's pretty likely they'd spot the mistake. Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.
      - spindritf 15y ago
        > Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people. But you're still asking the "wrong" people. And you're asking, instead of observing the actual behaviour.
jakeonthemove 15y ago
That is actually brilliant! I was thinking about something similar, how maybe a poor country could create jobs for its citizens online (and they'd be happy with much less than $7/hour). But this is actually a great idea for poor people in any country...
- DanBC 15y ago
  I'm surprised that there isn't better translation to "minority" languages.
hugh4life 15y ago
"found that you can make about $7/ hour." As someone who turks occasionally, you can't consistently make $7 an hour unless you have some skill that you could probably use on the job marketplace. $3-$4 is more like it.
- Dove 15y ago
  I can confirm that. The article he cites to support the claim (from 2009) indicates the author made $4 off a 350-500 word article, and $3 for a product review. Based on my experience, those went for about $1.50 and $0.50 as of about a year ago. $3/hr on Turk is pretty good, and you need some education and diligence to do it.
Alex3917 15y ago
What if the person doing the Turking was submitting crap data? It seems like you'd have to wait at least a couple days in order for the data to be validated.
- marshallp 15y ago
  Other platforms built on turk, such as crowdflower, have systems in place to assess accuracy. Another turk worker checks the quality of the work, or 3 workers do a task, and the best, as judged by a different set of workers, is given a bonus.
sturadnidge 15y ago
Be good if Amazon themselves got behind something like this, by providing the banking and payment infrastructure. They already issue credit cards, they could instead issue debit cards and directly pay into those. Would eliminate the need for a cash machine on the terminal, although the absurd ATM fees in the US might make it less viable I guess. I assume there are no charges for using debit cards for small transactions in the US (I live in the UK)?
ajays 15y ago
This is a great idea. It would really work if it supplements the welfare checks; it would get people into the mindset of working. Let me explain. Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream. A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work? On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare. Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.
- shingen 15y ago
  $20 / hour is a nice thought, but unfortunately what that would do is create massive unemployment and much larger welfare abuse. There's a fine line on just how high you can set a minimum wage (in relation to the economy in question) before you give too much incentive to companies to automate that labor, shrink their business slightly, or offload the costs to the consumer with price increases (net negative result). Google what happened in New Jersey when they raised minimum wage above the federal level years ago (low paid jobs got wiped out, companies fired workers and attempted to become more efficient, particularly it hammered fast food workers). Or this: "Dr. Peter Brandon of the Institute for Research on Poverty studied how raising the minimum wage affect the transition from welfare to work. He found that raising it keeps welfare mothers on welfare longer. Mothers on welfare in states that raised their minimum wage remained on welfare 44 percent longer than mothers on welfare in states where it was not raised" http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/against.htm http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/again...
wavephorm 15y ago
This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Company_.281908-1915.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...
- orbitingpluto 15y ago
  Henry Ford also thought it was important that his workers be able to purchase the product that they are making in order to drive the economy. Turking isn't even going to feed you.
- underwater 15y ago
  The point of Mechanical Turk is to decouple the workers from the task being done. As computing advances there should always be some kind of task that requires human effort.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
This is a non-starter for several reasons, mostly relating to spam. First, you can't just give people cash. They will immediately turn to spamming, and you'll get crap data. You need to do statistics, comparing turks to other turks, and only pay the ones who don't spam. It's highly likely you can't do this in realtime. Second, you need to track the identity of your turks. If worker X is known not to be a spammer, then you want to assign work to X preferentially. Similarly, if worker Y is a known spammer, you want to refuse him work. Third, most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?
- wilfra 15y ago
  It is not a non-starter for those reasons, it may just require some modification if they become problems or if it is deemed they are obstacles too big to even try to overcome. When getting instant, reliable cash is the result, people will jump through an enormous number of hoops - and even pay money themselves the for opportunity. For instance, you could require users to create an account on mturk and/or w/ the mturk shop so they can be tracked. If it is simple to do and prompted it should be fast an easy. If they can't even figure this out, they probably aren't qualified to be doing the work anyway.
- notatoad 15y ago
  "most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?" just because somebody is not looking for a structured job, doesn't mean they won't do tasks for money. think about the homeless guy who wanders around with his shopping cart collecting discarded cans all day. the only social issue i see with a turk kiosk is that it would essentially be a "do things in exchange for drugs" terminal.
Hominem 15y ago
I will do him one better. How about he opens a storefront with locked down machines that do nothing but mechanical Turk and rents them out for 1 an hour. Maybe wow gold farming . Anyone have an concerns about the ethics of this? On one had 6 net is better than 0, on the other hand it is fairly predatory.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Why lock them down? Why not just rent computers for $1/hr, like at a cyber cafe? That is a solved problem.
  - Hominem 15y ago
    I was thinking in terms of the hair salon model. Chairs are paid for by the stylists but they can only do hair, not give tattoos or just use thier chair to sit back and drink beer.
rmc 15y ago
For all the success that micro-lending has had in India and other countries, we haven’t really seen those benefits in American Urban areas. I thought the USA had "micro-lending", but they were called "payday loans"?
- zdw 15y ago
  Payday lenders have a significantly higher interest rate - on the order of 500-2000% of the principle per year. The purpose of it is to put the screws on people who aren't able to get loans elsewhere. Micro lending has more of a humanitarian goal - most organizations tend to lend at reasonable rates (3-15%/year).
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Those organizations lend to local "bankers" who lend out at higher rates to customers. Payday shops charge reasonable fees per loan, the same fees that all vendors and governments charge for you hanging on to money they want from you. The problem is that payday loan customers get trapped into taking excessive numbers of loans, multiplying fees.
    - sireat 15y ago
      With all due respect, payday shops do not charge "reasonable" fees, unless your definition of reasonable includes amounts higher than 100% APR. It should be noted that ordinarily vendors and governments do have reasonable late fees(certainly much less than one from payday shop). I do not remember paying more than 24% when I run late on some Accounts Payable when I run my shop at the turn of the millennium. Maybe it is now normal for vendors to ask for 100+% when a 30day net invoice runs late, who knows? It is when a vendor is about to deny service completely(ie pay $50 to reconnect electric utility), then a payday loan becomes a relatively reasonable option. There are a multitude of factors which go behind the rates(I am bundling in all of the fees into catch all rate) that payday shops charge: * Likelihood of borrower to repay * Ability of borrower to do simple math * Human psychology (goes with the simple math to calculate rate from fees) * Demand from borrowers Overall, payday shops charge more than regular lending institutions because they should(higher risk and some expenses). They also raise their effective rate beyond their "should rate" because they can. Their customers are not comparison shopping between 240% APR and 300% APR. I would argue that it should be made easier for their customers to do so, but that is another discussion.
john_horton 15y ago
It's been done (though instead of money, candy and instead of the urban poor, UC Berkeley CS students): http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-HeimerlTrinh.pdf http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-...
pron 15y ago
OMG! You guys! Aside from a few, most comments here are discussing how to actually do this efficiently. I think this might be forgivable as I assume many of you are quite young, but are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work? Again, I'd like to attribute the responses to the commenters' young age, and I trust your good intentions, but hackers, engineers and all entrepreneurs should really learn something about work-relations, social policy and ethics.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- wilfra 15y ago
  Pretty sure every libertarian (I am not one), regardless of age, would disagree with you. If people are willing to do the work for a given wage, the free market should be able to pay them (or so Libertarians believe).
  - pron 15y ago
    There's a market for everything: human organs; hit-jobs. But you know what, I'm not even arguing the merits of the free market. I'm simply amazed at the fact that most comments here simply discuss the efficiency of the process, as if this were an algorithm or a development methodology, rather than something involving real living people, and not any people, but the weakest in society. I'd like to suggest that instead of building work booths for the poor where machines will pay them money, perhaps the big companies should do everything in their power to make sure these people have a chance at a proper education, so that some day they could have jobs that would give them some dignity. Jobs that the mechanical-turk mega-farmers would wish for their children.
    - cornell532 15y ago
      Libertarianism would say that hit-jobs (and stolen organs) involve coercion. That is, it's not "2 consenting adults", but rather a market for doing harm on to other people and creating a "externality effect" of harm. This is similar to dumping pollutants into our air or oceans. Yes it might appear "free", but it actually does harm to 3rd parties. In fact, I think the market for human organs is an interesting analog. Personally, I think that introducing free-market principles into organ exchange would be beneficial to all! The notion of paying someone to agree to donate their organs at the end of their life benefits all of society (see wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation): LIVES are saved with the greater availability of organs, and the life of the donor is improved with access to money that he/she would otherwise not have. This is not a zero-sum game in which one person must lose for another to win. A principal of economics is that through commerce/trade/exchange we both prosper! Both sides want what the other side is giving them more than what they have to give up. ie the donor wants money more than organs, and the recipient wants organs more than money. Both sides win! I have absolutely no problem with compensating organ donors for actually helping other humans and improving society through their generous donation. Likewise, if 2 consenting adults want to engage in a relationship in which 1 works for an agreed upon wage, and the other provides that work, I see no reason to intervene in that arrangement. As long as each party is aware of the risks and the full terms of the deal are openly on the table (ie if doing this work could be deleterious to worker for some reason and that information is not disclosed) then people should be free to engage in their course of business.
newhouseb 15y ago
This is very similar to what Samasource (http://samasource.org/ http://samasource.org/) does except in a different demographic of poverty (in third world countries). The general idea is that in many places, such as refugee camps, no one has any money and there really aren't any jobs to act as segues to help people rise up out of poverty, if you build computer clusters in these areas, they can do mechanical turk style work, make a lot more money than they could otherwise and be supervised such that quality can be more controlled than a bunch of random people on the internet. Unfortunately they run on a different proprietary alternative to Mechanical Turk (presumably with some tweaks to fit their model).
URSpider94 15y ago
I've been sitting here for 10 minutes or so trying to find the right way to critique not just the article, but also the tone of the discussions here. I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching. If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided to call "bums"), then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? Would this solve real problems for them on a daily basis? What happens when it's cold and snowy out? How many of them know how to use a computer, or read? Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office, thinking that she knows what her customers want from her company's web site without ever asking them. Before you start throwing out solutions to urban poverty, you might want to at least talk to one or two of the people whose problems you are trying to solve.
- pron 15y ago
  Finally, some humanity here. Although I see that you've chosen to disguise it in a way "entrepreneurs" would understand. Market research? Alright :) As long it makes some people think what it's like to grow up poor. Me, I would suggest learning some history and philosophy before the monumental works of the "Lean Startup methodology".
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  > ... then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it's couched in statements like the ones you see here that assume that people have chosen poverty -- but that's the basic sentiment. > Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office... Well, this is at least consistent. If you think that people have merely chosen to be poor, then you simply need to persuade them to make a different choice. If one acknowledges that they don't know much about the lives of poor people, they should do what they would with any other domain where they lack experience -- find a domain expert. IMO, the best way to start would be to find those members of the urban poor demographic who have the intelligence and the motivation, but not the skills, to solve their own problems. Then, you can help them solve those problems.
tpolm 15y ago
I believe that captchabot and services alike have already successfully implemented this idea.
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
I like how everyone's discussing the right and wrong of it, weather it would work or not. A true entreprenuer would ignore all that and just try it anyway. We can talk about this till the world ends but at the end of the day, people much smarter than us have made predictions in all sorts of industries and been outsmarted by 2 guys in a garage who tried something crazy that should not have worked. I say go for it.
prawn 15y ago
Half-baked adaptations: Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play. Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.
tnuc 15y ago
Mechanical Turk takes up to 30 days to approve payment for any task, so instant payment is out of the question. Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated. Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.
- Drbble 15y ago
  These exist in China and India.
dools 15y ago
I suggest you find out how much someone makes pan-handling per hour. You may be shocked ...
prawn 15y ago
What about paywithatweet repurposed so you pay for digital goods with some Turking? Categorise 50 images and get your favourite local band's latest MP3. $1.90 to the band, $0.10 to the intermediary as their cut.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Pretty sure people who work for $1/hr don't want to spend it on mp3s.
  - prawn 15y ago
    I'm not talking about the less fortunate here, but adapting the Turk idea to something else half-baked. I could categorise 50 images in 2-3 minutes. It'd take me 1-2 minutes to get out my wallet, get the right credit card and enter the info if I were to pay manually. I ran the idea past two employees (neither homeless...) who both seemed to think they'd consider a quick spot of Turking in exchange for a digital good.
deepkut 15y ago
This sounds like the type of idea that Thiel would be into. I applaud your creativity and these discussions regarding minimum wage are surprisingly pertinent.
kristianp 15y ago
I can see one advantage to this, is that the poor don't have any computer skills, and this may give them basic familiarity with using websites. Although I imagine there would have to be a trainer present at all times to help when they get stuck. A more beneficial concept for the poor is microlending, helping the poor in third-world countries start their own businesses.
technotony 15y ago
This won't work, the wage rates on Mechanical Turk for unskilled, low motivated users are too low. I previously worked for a microfinance bank in the Philippines where we employed staff at a little over the minimum wage there which was $5 per day. While we were getting ready for a new product launch I had some staff we couldn't use yet, and seeing they all had computers and internet connection ran a small experiment on Mechanical Turk. They averaged $5-10 per day in income so I stopped it after a month. There were several problems: 1. Many of the more valuable task required you to meet certain 'skill' levels which these staff didn't 2. Motivation was a huge problem as spending hours per day clicking on images with people or editing text you don't understand was very dull 3. We had problems with internet bandwidth being too slow to allow running through tasks rapidly It was a pity this experiment failed as it would have been a great way to scale up and create income opportunities for some very destitute people.
Duff 15y ago
The problem with a "solution" like this is same as the problem that the minium wage presents: it is insufficient to live on, and less than the value of social services benefits. If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)
- Drbble 15y ago
  Wall Street tried that, by destroying the real estate market.
  - Duff 15y ago
    Wall St gave people with no money the ability to buy stuff that they cannot afford. I'm talking about a $300/mo apartment.
techiferous 15y ago
I suspect panhandlers make more than $7/hour, so for them to stop panhandling and start using a mechanical turk station would be a pay cut.
neworbit 15y ago
For better or worse, you're likely to get better results to your work requests by putting these same devices in chosen offshore locations; you're arbitraging median-skill median-lifestyle foreigners in lower cost of living areas versus lower-quartile lifestyle and limited-skill Americans. Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break. If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.

137 points by chrmaury 15y ago

This would be a great kickstarter project. You may want to modify it though so the station just prints a check or some other instrument other than cash or you will end up with a lot of broken Mechanical Turk Stations.

chrmaury 15y ago
Yea, broken machines or people getting mugged right after cashing out are both concerns. But the people who would benefit most from something like this would be least likely to have a bank account.
- dpres 15y ago
  Tons of businesses cash checks without a bank account. Another concern is kiosk hacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY
  - Professa 15y ago
    The kiosks actually coming up missing would be a bigger concern than hacking.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

shingen 15y ago

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage. Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread. Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage. It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility. One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.

jakeonthemove 15y ago
People already work for less than minimum wage... if they can find a job! This would just bring more employment opportunities to those who need it.
marshallp 15y ago
So what you also need is more businesses to use mechanical turk or similar services. There's a huge opportunity in that for startups. The biggest is probably bridging the physical and digital worlds. Controlling robots through mechanical turk. Every factory robot, cnc machine, or 3d printer needs someone to keep an eye on it in case anything goes wrong so that the machine can get shut off. Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person. And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > Controlling robots through mechanical turk. No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine. > And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best. Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.
  - marshallp 15y ago
    It's not as simple as that. It's not one poor guy looking a video feed or judging ads. It would be sophisticated system that pools together many workers in ways to get quality. So, for example, if the factory robot knocks something over, and there are 10 different people watching a few frames of video, it's pretty likely they'd spot the mistake. Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.
    - spindritf 15y ago
      > Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people. But you're still asking the "wrong" people. And you're asking, instead of observing the actual behaviour.

jakeonthemove 15y ago

That is actually brilliant! I was thinking about something similar, how maybe a poor country could create jobs for its citizens online (and they'd be happy with much less than $7/hour). But this is actually a great idea for poor people in any country...

DanBC 15y ago
I'm surprised that there isn't better translation to "minority" languages.

hugh4life 15y ago

"found that you can make about $7/ hour." As someone who turks occasionally, you can't consistently make $7 an hour unless you have some skill that you could probably use on the job marketplace. $3-$4 is more like it.

Dove 15y ago
I can confirm that. The article he cites to support the claim (from 2009) indicates the author made $4 off a 350-500 word article, and $3 for a product review. Based on my experience, those went for about $1.50 and $0.50 as of about a year ago. $3/hr on Turk is pretty good, and you need some education and diligence to do it.

Alex3917 15y ago

What if the person doing the Turking was submitting crap data? It seems like you'd have to wait at least a couple days in order for the data to be validated.

marshallp 15y ago
Other platforms built on turk, such as crowdflower, have systems in place to assess accuracy. Another turk worker checks the quality of the work, or 3 workers do a task, and the best, as judged by a different set of workers, is given a bonus.

sturadnidge 15y ago

Be good if Amazon themselves got behind something like this, by providing the banking and payment infrastructure. They already issue credit cards, they could instead issue debit cards and directly pay into those. Would eliminate the need for a cash machine on the terminal, although the absurd ATM fees in the US might make it less viable I guess. I assume there are no charges for using debit cards for small transactions in the US (I live in the UK)?

ajays 15y ago

This is a great idea. It would really work if it supplements the welfare checks; it would get people into the mindset of working. Let me explain. Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream. A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work? On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare. Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.

shingen 15y ago
$20 / hour is a nice thought, but unfortunately what that would do is create massive unemployment and much larger welfare abuse. There's a fine line on just how high you can set a minimum wage (in relation to the economy in question) before you give too much incentive to companies to automate that labor, shrink their business slightly, or offload the costs to the consumer with price increases (net negative result). Google what happened in New Jersey when they raised minimum wage above the federal level years ago (low paid jobs got wiped out, companies fired workers and attempted to become more efficient, particularly it hammered fast food workers). Or this: "Dr. Peter Brandon of the Institute for Research on Poverty studied how raising the minimum wage affect the transition from welfare to work. He found that raising it keeps welfare mothers on welfare longer. Mothers on welfare in states that raised their minimum wage remained on welfare 44 percent longer than mothers on welfare in states where it was not raised" http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/against.htm http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/again...

wavephorm 15y ago

This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Company_.281908-1915.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...

orbitingpluto 15y ago
Henry Ford also thought it was important that his workers be able to purchase the product that they are making in order to drive the economy. Turking isn't even going to feed you.
underwater 15y ago
The point of Mechanical Turk is to decouple the workers from the task being done. As computing advances there should always be some kind of task that requires human effort.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

This is a non-starter for several reasons, mostly relating to spam. First, you can't just give people cash. They will immediately turn to spamming, and you'll get crap data. You need to do statistics, comparing turks to other turks, and only pay the ones who don't spam. It's highly likely you can't do this in realtime. Second, you need to track the identity of your turks. If worker X is known not to be a spammer, then you want to assign work to X preferentially. Similarly, if worker Y is a known spammer, you want to refuse him work. Third, most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?

wilfra 15y ago
It is not a non-starter for those reasons, it may just require some modification if they become problems or if it is deemed they are obstacles too big to even try to overcome. When getting instant, reliable cash is the result, people will jump through an enormous number of hoops - and even pay money themselves the for opportunity. For instance, you could require users to create an account on mturk and/or w/ the mturk shop so they can be tracked. If it is simple to do and prompted it should be fast an easy. If they can't even figure this out, they probably aren't qualified to be doing the work anyway.
notatoad 15y ago
"most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?" just because somebody is not looking for a structured job, doesn't mean they won't do tasks for money. think about the homeless guy who wanders around with his shopping cart collecting discarded cans all day. the only social issue i see with a turk kiosk is that it would essentially be a "do things in exchange for drugs" terminal.

Hominem 15y ago

I will do him one better. How about he opens a storefront with locked down machines that do nothing but mechanical Turk and rents them out for 1 an hour. Maybe wow gold farming . Anyone have an concerns about the ethics of this? On one had 6 net is better than 0, on the other hand it is fairly predatory.

Drbble 15y ago
Why lock them down? Why not just rent computers for $1/hr, like at a cyber cafe? That is a solved problem.
- Hominem 15y ago
  I was thinking in terms of the hair salon model. Chairs are paid for by the stylists but they can only do hair, not give tattoos or just use thier chair to sit back and drink beer.

rmc 15y ago

For all the success that micro-lending has had in India and other countries, we haven’t really seen those benefits in American Urban areas. I thought the USA had "micro-lending", but they were called "payday loans"?

zdw 15y ago
Payday lenders have a significantly higher interest rate - on the order of 500-2000% of the principle per year. The purpose of it is to put the screws on people who aren't able to get loans elsewhere. Micro lending has more of a humanitarian goal - most organizations tend to lend at reasonable rates (3-15%/year).
- Drbble 15y ago
  Those organizations lend to local "bankers" who lend out at higher rates to customers. Payday shops charge reasonable fees per loan, the same fees that all vendors and governments charge for you hanging on to money they want from you. The problem is that payday loan customers get trapped into taking excessive numbers of loans, multiplying fees.
  - sireat 15y ago
    With all due respect, payday shops do not charge "reasonable" fees, unless your definition of reasonable includes amounts higher than 100% APR. It should be noted that ordinarily vendors and governments do have reasonable late fees(certainly much less than one from payday shop). I do not remember paying more than 24% when I run late on some Accounts Payable when I run my shop at the turn of the millennium. Maybe it is now normal for vendors to ask for 100+% when a 30day net invoice runs late, who knows? It is when a vendor is about to deny service completely(ie pay $50 to reconnect electric utility), then a payday loan becomes a relatively reasonable option. There are a multitude of factors which go behind the rates(I am bundling in all of the fees into catch all rate) that payday shops charge: * Likelihood of borrower to repay * Ability of borrower to do simple math * Human psychology (goes with the simple math to calculate rate from fees) * Demand from borrowers Overall, payday shops charge more than regular lending institutions because they should(higher risk and some expenses). They also raise their effective rate beyond their "should rate" because they can. Their customers are not comparison shopping between 240% APR and 300% APR. I would argue that it should be made easier for their customers to do so, but that is another discussion.

john_horton 15y ago

It's been done (though instead of money, candy and instead of the urban poor, UC Berkeley CS students): http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-HeimerlTrinh.pdf http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-...

pron 15y ago

OMG! You guys! Aside from a few, most comments here are discussing how to actually do this efficiently. I think this might be forgivable as I assume many of you are quite young, but are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work? Again, I'd like to attribute the responses to the commenters' young age, and I trust your good intentions, but hackers, engineers and all entrepreneurs should really learn something about work-relations, social policy and ethics.

deleted 15y ago
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wilfra 15y ago
Pretty sure every libertarian (I am not one), regardless of age, would disagree with you. If people are willing to do the work for a given wage, the free market should be able to pay them (or so Libertarians believe).
- pron 15y ago
  There's a market for everything: human organs; hit-jobs. But you know what, I'm not even arguing the merits of the free market. I'm simply amazed at the fact that most comments here simply discuss the efficiency of the process, as if this were an algorithm or a development methodology, rather than something involving real living people, and not any people, but the weakest in society. I'd like to suggest that instead of building work booths for the poor where machines will pay them money, perhaps the big companies should do everything in their power to make sure these people have a chance at a proper education, so that some day they could have jobs that would give them some dignity. Jobs that the mechanical-turk mega-farmers would wish for their children.
  - cornell532 15y ago
    Libertarianism would say that hit-jobs (and stolen organs) involve coercion. That is, it's not "2 consenting adults", but rather a market for doing harm on to other people and creating a "externality effect" of harm. This is similar to dumping pollutants into our air or oceans. Yes it might appear "free", but it actually does harm to 3rd parties. In fact, I think the market for human organs is an interesting analog. Personally, I think that introducing free-market principles into organ exchange would be beneficial to all! The notion of paying someone to agree to donate their organs at the end of their life benefits all of society (see wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation): LIVES are saved with the greater availability of organs, and the life of the donor is improved with access to money that he/she would otherwise not have. This is not a zero-sum game in which one person must lose for another to win. A principal of economics is that through commerce/trade/exchange we both prosper! Both sides want what the other side is giving them more than what they have to give up. ie the donor wants money more than organs, and the recipient wants organs more than money. Both sides win! I have absolutely no problem with compensating organ donors for actually helping other humans and improving society through their generous donation. Likewise, if 2 consenting adults want to engage in a relationship in which 1 works for an agreed upon wage, and the other provides that work, I see no reason to intervene in that arrangement. As long as each party is aware of the risks and the full terms of the deal are openly on the table (ie if doing this work could be deleterious to worker for some reason and that information is not disclosed) then people should be free to engage in their course of business.

newhouseb 15y ago

This is very similar to what Samasource (http://samasource.org/ http://samasource.org/) does except in a different demographic of poverty (in third world countries). The general idea is that in many places, such as refugee camps, no one has any money and there really aren't any jobs to act as segues to help people rise up out of poverty, if you build computer clusters in these areas, they can do mechanical turk style work, make a lot more money than they could otherwise and be supervised such that quality can be more controlled than a bunch of random people on the internet. Unfortunately they run on a different proprietary alternative to Mechanical Turk (presumably with some tweaks to fit their model).

URSpider94 15y ago

I've been sitting here for 10 minutes or so trying to find the right way to critique not just the article, but also the tone of the discussions here. I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching. If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided to call "bums"), then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? Would this solve real problems for them on a daily basis? What happens when it's cold and snowy out? How many of them know how to use a computer, or read? Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office, thinking that she knows what her customers want from her company's web site without ever asking them. Before you start throwing out solutions to urban poverty, you might want to at least talk to one or two of the people whose problems you are trying to solve.

pron 15y ago
Finally, some humanity here. Although I see that you've chosen to disguise it in a way "entrepreneurs" would understand. Market research? Alright :) As long it makes some people think what it's like to grow up poor. Me, I would suggest learning some history and philosophy before the monumental works of the "Lean Startup methodology".
jessedhillon 15y ago
> ... then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it's couched in statements like the ones you see here that assume that people have chosen poverty -- but that's the basic sentiment. > Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office... Well, this is at least consistent. If you think that people have merely chosen to be poor, then you simply need to persuade them to make a different choice. If one acknowledges that they don't know much about the lives of poor people, they should do what they would with any other domain where they lack experience -- find a domain expert. IMO, the best way to start would be to find those members of the urban poor demographic who have the intelligence and the motivation, but not the skills, to solve their own problems. Then, you can help them solve those problems.

tpolm 15y ago

I believe that captchabot and services alike have already successfully implemented this idea.

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago

I like how everyone's discussing the right and wrong of it, weather it would work or not. A true entreprenuer would ignore all that and just try it anyway. We can talk about this till the world ends but at the end of the day, people much smarter than us have made predictions in all sorts of industries and been outsmarted by 2 guys in a garage who tried something crazy that should not have worked. I say go for it.

prawn 15y ago

Half-baked adaptations: Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play. Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.

tnuc 15y ago

Mechanical Turk takes up to 30 days to approve payment for any task, so instant payment is out of the question. Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated. Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.

Drbble 15y ago
These exist in China and India.

dools 15y ago

I suggest you find out how much someone makes pan-handling per hour. You may be shocked ...

prawn 15y ago

What about paywithatweet repurposed so you pay for digital goods with some Turking? Categorise 50 images and get your favourite local band's latest MP3. $1.90 to the band, $0.10 to the intermediary as their cut.

Drbble 15y ago
Pretty sure people who work for $1/hr don't want to spend it on mp3s.
- prawn 15y ago
  I'm not talking about the less fortunate here, but adapting the Turk idea to something else half-baked. I could categorise 50 images in 2-3 minutes. It'd take me 1-2 minutes to get out my wallet, get the right credit card and enter the info if I were to pay manually. I ran the idea past two employees (neither homeless...) who both seemed to think they'd consider a quick spot of Turking in exchange for a digital good.

deepkut 15y ago

This sounds like the type of idea that Thiel would be into. I applaud your creativity and these discussions regarding minimum wage are surprisingly pertinent.

kristianp 15y ago

I can see one advantage to this, is that the poor don't have any computer skills, and this may give them basic familiarity with using websites. Although I imagine there would have to be a trainer present at all times to help when they get stuck. A more beneficial concept for the poor is microlending, helping the poor in third-world countries start their own businesses.

technotony 15y ago

This won't work, the wage rates on Mechanical Turk for unskilled, low motivated users are too low. I previously worked for a microfinance bank in the Philippines where we employed staff at a little over the minimum wage there which was $5 per day. While we were getting ready for a new product launch I had some staff we couldn't use yet, and seeing they all had computers and internet connection ran a small experiment on Mechanical Turk. They averaged $5-10 per day in income so I stopped it after a month. There were several problems: 1. Many of the more valuable task required you to meet certain 'skill' levels which these staff didn't 2. Motivation was a huge problem as spending hours per day clicking on images with people or editing text you don't understand was very dull 3. We had problems with internet bandwidth being too slow to allow running through tasks rapidly It was a pity this experiment failed as it would have been a great way to scale up and create income opportunities for some very destitute people.

Duff 15y ago

The problem with a "solution" like this is same as the problem that the minium wage presents: it is insufficient to live on, and less than the value of social services benefits. If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)

Drbble 15y ago
Wall Street tried that, by destroying the real estate market.
- Duff 15y ago
  Wall St gave people with no money the ability to buy stuff that they cannot afford. I'm talking about a $300/mo apartment.

techiferous 15y ago

I suspect panhandlers make more than $7/hour, so for them to stop panhandling and start using a mechanical turk station would be a pay cut.

neworbit 15y ago

For better or worse, you're likely to get better results to your work requests by putting these same devices in chosen offshore locations; you're arbitraging median-skill median-lifestyle foreigners in lower cost of living areas versus lower-quartile lifestyle and limited-skill Americans. Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break. If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.