DISQUS

Bumblebee Labs Blog: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

  • David Jones · 8 months ago
    Your Calorie tracking example illustrates that Mechanical Turk relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth.

    The rich, fat, lazy person snaps a picture of his lavish meal with a fancy iPhone, and rather than take a brief moment to ponder the calories, ... uploads it for, not just one, but *three* other people to ponder and estimate the calories and report back. The most dissimilar answer is rejected; that person is not compensated.

    This only works if there is a very large pool of very poor people who are willing to do these mundane tasks for (fractions of) pennies. These "workers" certainly can't afford an iPhone; they probably can't even afford the meal they are looking at.
  • Hang · 8 months ago
    There's a common perception that Mechanical Turk thrives on exploiting 3rd world labor. This doesn't appear to be the case.

    From:
    http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008... and
    http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2008/07/mechanical...
    82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor's degree or higher.
  • FutureWork · 8 months ago
    So, is amazon also keeping track of the pics and the classifications for the purposes of training machine learning algorithms in the future?
  • Radu Floricica · 8 months ago
    @David Jones

    Nope. It simply means the efficiency of counting calories for your meal, while eating it, and counting calories for a living are extremely different.

    I can easily imagine having a calorie-counting job, where I can look at a photo, recognize the ingredients, maybe receive a total portion weight along with the photo and make an estimate, all in less then a minute. Probably a lot less, because of the 80/20 rule (80% the pictures will be common meals, for which I'd know the contents by heart).

    So 1 minute per photo, 60 minutes pe hour - easily $30 per hour. Not exactly you average third world income, is it?
  • Hang · 8 months ago
    @FutureWork: I'm sure they store the images but I don't think they have any immediate plans to provide any machine learning. It's a hard enough problem and MTurkers do a good enough job that there's no immediate incentive.
  • Janet · 8 months ago
    You should see Lilly Irani's work on Mechanical Turk at http://www.differenceengines.com/ and http://turkwork.differenceengines.com/blog/
    Especially check out the Haikus.
  • Brynn Evans · 8 months ago
    @David Jones

    Paying a Turker for their labor and accepting their work for your own purposes are completely separate (to me). I pay everyone for their work (except for blatent scams), even if their work wasn't quite what I was looking for.

    Also, in my many adventures on MTurk -- I can attest to their caliber. Not only are they not 3rd world (I've paid IRS agents, United Nations employees, scientists, etc.), they are quite considerate and diligent.
  • gregorylent · 8 months ago
    eye-opening post, thanks
  • Derrick · 7 months ago
    This is my first introduction into the MT. Having looked at it, I would mention that if the service were more widely used-in relation to say, the number of people who shop at Amazon-then it might be more difficult to find people who are able/willing to work as MTs. As the service scales up, its demographics, and how it works, will change. That said, it makes sense that most people would be in the US/Canada, we have VASTLY more people on computers than most other places, are at the cutting edge of services like this. Also, there is a big difference between MTs for products, I would imagine, than MTs for food simply because there is more access to profit through products by sellers becoming/hiring MTs.

    All that said, there is a good chance that this could provide some insight into the future organization of the labor market, although I would assume it will end up being something like a MT version of call centers.
  • jhuff · 5 months ago
    Great analysis of an emerging decentralized workforce. This site has some inspiring stories and windows into the lives of people who Turk for a living.

    http://mechanicalturkdiaries.com/

    The Mechanical Turk Diaries - the voice of Amazon's anonymous workforce. Unedited memoirs from Turkers.
  • staffing1 · 2 weeks ago
    Great analysis of an emerging decentralized workforce. This site has some inspiring stories and windows into the lives of people who Turk for a living.