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Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

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Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#51

Post by muzani »

akerl_ wrote: post #27
maxrmk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as net negative about it? I’m familiar with the product but not that aware of how it’s been used.

It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans. Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks.

The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem here - factory workers would live in hostels, eat the free factory food or the cheap street food that cropped up near the area. They'd meet and marry other factory workers, have kids, who'd also work there. They were a modern little serfdom. Same goes for plantations.

Things like gig work and mturk were an exit from that. Not always leaving an unhappy or dangerous life, but making their own life.

If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#52

Post by stevejb »

hiddencost wrote: post #17
stevejb wrote: post #10

Using the Propser.com data set (a peer-to-peer lending market), I used MTurk to analyze the images of people applying for a loan. This was used in a finance research project with 3 University of Washington professors of Finance. The idea was that the Prosper data set contained all of the information that a lending officer would have, but they also had user-submitted pictures. We wanted to see if there was value in th…

Yikes. Have you ever considered that you were hurting people?

Yeah, whenever there are human subjects there is an IRB which is necessary. But, beyond that, we didn't participate in the market in any way. We wanted to see if there was bias there, and how much of it. I think I may have used the word 'value' in a bad way in my description. Not 'value' as in 'can we exploit people?' but value as in statistical significance. E.g. if you applied for a loan and your profile picture contained yourself with a child, did that help you, hurt you, or was it neutral?

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#53

Post by sireat »

I have a story from the mechanical side.

I spent a month in 2012 roughly 4 hours a day doing various tasks.

It was horrible, even if I followed all the "best practices" of Turkers it was not a way to make a living.

By end of the month, I had become so jaded to all the "priming" experiments by graduate and undergraduate psychology students. Those usually paid at least something 3-4 USD an hour.

Did some porn labeling tasks, those were horrible after the novelty wore off.

Did very few other labeling tasks because they paid next to nothing.

To have someone actually depend on living for these seemed like a torture.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#54

Post by ryandvm »

frmersdog wrote: post #12

If there's any justice, a good number of comments will focus on the ethical nightmare MTurk turned out to be. Apologies to the people who worked on it, but it's fair and appropriate for observers to point out when someone has spent their time and energy creating something that is a net negative for the state of society. That's probably the case here.

I feel like that's a good summary of Amazon in general.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#55

Post by frmersdog »

muzani wrote: post #51
akerl_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans. Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks. The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem he…

I got paid $11 an hour to enter handwritten applications into a database, as a temp job back in the early 2010s. It was "low-skill" inasmuch as, "Locking in and moving efficiently through entire filing cabinets of forms, often written by people whose first script was not Latin, for 6-7 hours straight, every weekday, for 2 months, with no prior training," is "low-skill" (and I apparently did it much faster than my supervisors expected). $11/hr was less than it should have paid, and yet I have to commend the company I was working with, because they sourced local labor and paid still multiple times what the job would have commanded through outsourcing via Mturk.

The conditions you're describing were caused by the systemic globalist status quo that Mturk is a part of; Mturk did not fix that, it perpetuated it.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#56

Post by stickfigure »

sireat wrote: post #53

I have a story from the mechanical side. I spent a month in 2012 roughly 4 hours a day doing various tasks. It was horrible, even if I followed all the "best practices" of Turkers it was not a way to make a living. By end of the month, I had become so jaded to all the "priming" experiments by graduate and undergraduate psychology students. Those usually paid at least something 3-4 USD an hour. Did some porn labeling…

What country do you live in?

There are places where $3-$4 USD per hour is significantly higher than the prevailing wage. This is not a great fact about global wealth disparity, but that money goes towards improving the situation not making it worse.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#58

Post by akerl_ »

muzani wrote: post #51
akerl_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans. Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks. The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem he…

> If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

This paragraph is so tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the issue. The fact that a company found someone willing to do a job for what they want to pay does not mean that it's ethical or moral for them to do so.

In this case (as in many others), one of the predicates was finding groups of people whose existing options, financial literacy, living conditions, or some combination of the three were already so bad that becoming digital serfs was a minor step up.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#59

Post by mrdependable »

linkregister wrote: post #41
frmersdog wrote: post #12

If there's any justice, a good number of comments will focus on the ethical nightmare MTurk turned out to be. Apologies to the people who worked on it, but it's fair and appropriate for observers to point out when someone has spent their time and energy creating something that is a net negative for the state of society. That's probably the case here.

If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.

I have no idea what the situation was for people doing the work on mturk, but how far would your logic extend? Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk? If not, there has to be some ethical relationship between how desperate a worker is and how much you pay them. My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work. I don't get the feeling that was the situation.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#60

Post by linkregister »

mrdependable wrote: post #59
linkregister wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.

I have no idea what the situation was for people doing the work on mturk, but how far would your logic extend? Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk? If not, there has to be some ethical relationship between how desperate a worker is and how much you pay them. My hope is that they have to work a similar number of…

Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.

> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.

Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .

> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?

Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.

I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.

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