Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

> ... 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.

I hope you are wrong about this. And my tone is more than slightly hysterical - I am downright panicking. If Ayn-Randian ideology has taken over the hearts of young Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs, and if that is the current way of thinking in Northern California of all places, then we've got a problem.

But I think you're wrong. I think what we're reading here is not a heartfelt, confident business or social ideology, but a hacker's frame of mind. A hacker mostly thinks about how to do things well. Sometimes he thinks about what to do. Only rarely does he consider the question of why, in the grand scheme of things. Very few hackers consider the social ramifications of technology, and when they do, it's usually very short-term.

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): 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.

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.

Well, I think that the problem with what you're saying is the definition of "consent". Suppose there existed a part of society that was born to people of means, or at least - connections. Then, suppose there was another part that was born to generations of neglect, and even abuse by the other part (I think that in the US, abuse had taken some extreme forms at various times in history). Now, I'm not so sure that a person coming from the disadvantaged part of society can actually give his free "consent" to sell a kidney to someone coming from the well-connected part. Sure, both side may want what the other side offers, but I doubt the freedom of such a decision. There are many forms of coercion - some of them very subtle yet very powerful.

EDIT: Though, again, my main complaint isn't about one opinion or another regarding this issue, but about the lack of discussion of what is, in-fact, the real issue here. Instead, I see commenters suggesting ways to deal with vandalism or "crap data". To me it sounds like discussing the (efficient) mechanics of, well, I don't want to give extreme historical analogies here which do not apply, but the point is that people are quick to suggest ways for improving a process before giving serious, and I mean serious, thought to the question of whether this process should exist in the first place, and what could its effect be on the minds and souls of the people its targeting.