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.
Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#12Amazon 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.
A lot of companies do that already, for machine learning dataset training.
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#13Amazon 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/Sig...
edit: grammer
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#14Amazon 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…
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.
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#15My 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.
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.
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#16Amazon 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…
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.
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.
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#17Amazon 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…
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.
Wouldn't the first outcome be a preferable scenario?
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#18Amazon 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…
To some extent, this happens today. In countries like Australia and the UK, companies that pay their fair share of tax and employ a lot of people are viewed upon favourably by government. For instance, the entire automotive industry in Australia.
The problem becomes when globalisation occurs, and those companies are no longer competitive against foreign car companies. The Australian government tried to bail out the automotive industry, twice, and it still collapsed. There are no longer any cars manufactured in Australia with Holden (GM), Ford and Toyota all leaving in recent years.
Yes, you can introduce metrics of number of employees (direct and indirect), tax paid per employee, etc etc. But consumers won't pay double just because the car created a job in their country.
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#19In 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/10.1177/216770261246901...
Re: Inside Amazon's clickworker platform
#20It'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..
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