Bumblebee Labs Blog - Latest Comments in Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

700R4 Transmission — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 11:55:55 -0000

This is cool! And so interested! Are u have more posts like this? Plese tell me, thanks

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Used Transmission — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:06:49 -0000

This is cool! And so interested! Are u have more posts like this? Plese tell me, thanks

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

staffing1 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:37:57 -0000

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

jhuff — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:23:16 -0000

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://mechanicalturkdiarie...

The Mechanical Turk Diaries - the voice of Amazon's anonymous workforce. Unedited memoirs from Turkers.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

gregorylent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:27:00 -0000

eye-opening post, thanks

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Brynn Evans — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:15:41 -0000

@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.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Janet — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:34:49 -0000

You should see Lilly Irani's work on Mechanical Turk at http://www.differenceengine... and http://turkwork.differencee...
Especially check out the Haikus.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Hang — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:20:48 -0000

@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.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Radu Floricica — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:16:25 -0000

@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?

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

FutureWork — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:09:57 -0000

So, is amazon also keeping track of the pics and the classifications for the purposes of training machine learning algorithms in the future?

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

Hang — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:29:31 -0000

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-lin... and
http://asc-parc.blogspot.co...
82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor's degree or higher.

Re: Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor

David Jones — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:24:14 -0000

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.