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Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

chrismaury.com

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Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#101

Post by meric »

krschultz wrote: post #97
gojomo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look up the debate via the Wikipedia article and other sources. The case for reduced jobs in most situations is very strong, the arguments about overall welfare more intense. Often analytical (rather than emotional) minimum wage proponents admit a small decrease in total employment but think the benefits to those who make the cutoff helps offset that. That might even be true in a growing economy with generall…

Let's say we cut minimum wage in half. How many jobs are going to be created? If it's not profitable for the business to hire a worker at $7 an hour, is it going to be at $3/hour? That's a business with crazy low margins. Pretty much right now minimum wage workers usually do service jobs (fast food, waiting, etc), household chores (cleaning, landscaping), farming, or no-skill manufacturing. No-skill manufacturing is…

I am all for setting up a minimum wage below the fair price of labor. This way you protect people who are vulnerable, e.g. people with no savings or can't speak the language, while at the same time ensure more people who wants a job can get one.

There are some people who can only be hired with a wage below the minimum:- high school dropouts, immigrants, physically disabled, blind, mentally ill, elderly, long term unemployed. By setting up a minimum wage too high you are ensuring all these people will not get jobs even if they want or need one. To the employers eyes: if you had to pay $7/hr anyway to hire someone, you might as well hire someone who is physically strong, understands english and has graduated high school.

The minimum wage makes people on the lowest tier unemployable. Arguably it does raise wages for workers on the people near the bottom but not quite there. As you can see there is certainly a trade-off to be made.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#103

Post by meric »

gregholmberg wrote: post #100
yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working. A third, mostly unexplored option, is to reduce the status/luxuries of people accepting welfare. I.e., instead of receiving housing vouchers and money to buy food/clothing, they could receive dormitory rooms (no TV or XBox), healthy dormitory meals and government issued grey jumpsuits. Under such a system, there would be a signi…

... instead of receiving housing vouchers and money to buy food/clothing, they could receive dormitory rooms (no TV or XBox), healthy dormitory meals and government issued grey jumpsuits. I am surprised, and a little disappointed, that there has been no mention yet in these comments of Marshall Brain's story "Robotic Nation". It is a well-reasoned exploration of exactly this issue. -----------------------------------…

One thing I still don't get from marshall brain (from his otherwise visionary writing), is: If there is going to be 50% unemployment, who is going to be spending their money on flights. Will people eat as much fast food? If no one is working, who needs robotic tax accountants?

He says there would be many sectors where human jobs are replaced. I'd say many sectors gone, completely. Who needs to go to a fast food restaurant when your robot can make it for you for... the price of bread? Who needs tax accountants when your computer can do it?

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#105

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

pron wrote: post #46

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…

lol, you must be in lala land. There are millions of poeple in the United States of America that live in Third World Country like conditions. Unless you're willing to empty your bank account and help them out, this is way it is. That's how the USA got started, that's how China is getting started, that's how Dubai got started. That's reality. The world is not perfect, a shitty job is better than no job.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#106

Post by kristianp »

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#107

Post by javascriptlol »

gojomo wrote: post #94
blahedo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare Cite, please.

You can look up the debate via the Wikipedia article and other sources. The case for reduced jobs in most situations is very strong, the arguments about overall welfare more intense. Often analytical (rather than emotional) minimum wage proponents admit a small decrease in total employment but think the benefits to those who make the cutoff helps offset that. That might even be true in a growing economy with generall…

You presuppose several things: 1) that "analytical" thinking (whatever that even means) is superior to "emotional" thinking, and 2) that benefits can be boiled down to economic nonsense (e.g. "money", "happiness").

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#108

Post by technotony »

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#109

Post by Duff »

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)

Re: Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

#110

Post by gregholmberg »

meric wrote: post #103
gregholmberg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... instead of receiving housing vouchers and money to buy food/clothing, they could receive dormitory rooms (no TV or XBox), healthy dormitory meals and government issued grey jumpsuits. I am surprised, and a little disappointed, that there has been no mention yet in these comments of Marshall Brain's story "Robotic Nation". It is a well-reasoned exploration of exactly this issue. -----------------------------------…

One thing I still don't get from marshall brain (from his otherwise visionary writing), is: If there is going to be 50% unemployment, who is going to be spending their money on flights. Will people eat as much fast food? If no one is working, who needs robotic tax accountants? He says there would be many sectors where human jobs are replaced. I'd say many sectors gone, completely. Who needs to go to a fast food resta…

I am cautiously optimistic that something will appear to engage the bodies and minds of those thrown out of work by any future waves of automation.

The solution will probably be something that I think is silly today.

An example. I was a fairly early adopter of the Internet. By the time I got around to reading Ender's Game, the leading search engine was Archie, and the web had not been invented. But I recognized Usenet (or something like it) in Card's description of discussion boards.

I thought the idea that anyone might achieve anything practical in the real world based on the strength of electronically published rhetoric was not just silly, but slap-my-knee hilarious.

Just look, I thought, at the laughable impotence of all these "letters to the editor" in newspapers. Surely electronic journalism will be cheaper, easier and much more accessible, therefore much more popular, and therefore of exponentially less value.

I kept chuckling for years, even as blogging gained popularity and influence.

Even though I was quite interested in an outcome like Card predicted, and had even been involved in getting the machinery in place to support a future like he imagined, I still reached a conclusion that was completely unsound.

We will probably be fine.

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