Amazon has a new web service which they call Mechanical Turk, after a fake chess playing robot from the 18th century.
Amazon describes it like this:
Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.
Most of the task available for completion today involve looking at a set of streetscape photographs and picking the one that is the best picture of a specified business. For completing such a task, you can earn 3 cents.
For the more ambitious, you can help Amazon re-catalog the automotive parts they sell, earning 40 cents for re-writing the title and bullet points for a custom license plate holder or a exhaust tube extension.
At first I was intrigued by this. Interesting use of technology. (There's even an API for it: hey, I could use Mechanical Turk tasks as a captcha for blog comments, and readers would earn money for me...) Free market goodness. And as Amazon says:
Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.
What's not to like?
Then I noticed Amazon's subtitle for the Mechanical Turk service: "Artificial Artificial Intelligence". That seems a little creepy. Reducing humans to cheap computing power. But don't think I'm reading too much into this. Here are two paragraphs from the FAQ:
When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.
I don't know if I'm more disturbed by the philosophical implications of this Matrix-lite inversion of control, by the commodification of intelligence it represents, or by the implications for workers rights. A system like this will just accelerate the race to the bottom: even offshore worker's jobs won't be safe. Heck, they could probably train pigeons to do some of the image recognition tasks they're currently paying 3 cents for. 3 cents probably buys a lot of pigeon pellets.
I'm not qualified to really critique Mechanical Turk the way it needs to be critiqued. Perhaps former O'Reilly editor Steve Talbot will write about it in his wonderful NetFuture newsletter.
Mechanical Turk is still a beta service. I hope it fails.
This sort of manual work is already being done abroad in locales without labor laws, both because it's cheaper and because it wouldn't be done at all otherwise - the return on investment wouldn't be high enough to justify paying an American minimum wage for it.
However, currently most outsourcing is done through an intermediary - a company in America or abroad, founded by someone who's either immigrated to America or has spent time in America, who takes the lion's share of the payment as overhead. Amazon's Mechanical Turk gives workers abroad the potential to deal directly with a company in America without some intermediary company taking a huge portion of the payment (Amazon's 10% is modest), creating a situation where American companies can pay less while the workers can earn more. For these reasons, I hope it catches on.
And human intelligence has long been commodified. :)
Thanks for your comment, Greg.
Intelligence has been commodified before, but never as crassly as Amazon is doing. What's new here is the use of humans as grid computing nodes. If Mechanical Turk does not give us pause, then we're taking all the brain=computer metaphors too literally.
Mechanical Turk is creating a market for buying and selling electronic grunt work. Even if we accept this as okay, I think that framing it all as a way for humans to help the computers is at best, very bad marketing.
Furthermore, I'm not sure I agree that setting up the marketplace is a good thing. But I don't feel qualified to argue this point.
But I should say that Mecahnical Turk won't stop intermdiaries. The low wage workers in Mumbai (or whereever) aren't going to be doing this on their home computers and cable internet connections. If they have those things, I assume that they've already got better paying work. They're going to be going to work at a terminal in a sweatshop, and Amazon is going to be sending checks to the US bank account of the owner of that sweatshop
I can see where you're coming from, and had some similar thoughts while conceptualizing CHI, the Collaboratie Human Interpreter, but I think the basic difference to abuse/Matrix/fascism and what-not is that people do it of their own free will.
While I can understand the creepiness factor, and to some extent the labor issues you are worried about; my take was that this was a very positive sign.
The fact that Amazon can source and aggregate this type of labour almost frictionlessly is a big deal, the pool from which amazon can draw workers is not nearly as large as you think (computer literate adults who read english and whose time online is not better employed) and so piece rates will climb as more valuable types of work get assigned to this system. As for demand I think there is a larger pool of pent-up demand than anyone recognizes, at present the tasks are straightforward and require little training, at some point tasks will be more complex, implying rarer levels of skill, implying greater pay.
This Mechanical Turk thing has the potential to revolutionise the low-end of the global job market as the "Job Anyone Can Get" and if competition for human cogitation and attention increases... that's a good thing isn't it?
I mean if walmart has to treat it's workers better because any of them can make more money staying home and pattern-matching, I'm all for it. Not that that's going to be the case right away, but in a few years it very well could be.
Thanks for your comment, Larry.
If you're right that rates actually rise and Mechanical Turk competes with WalMart, that would be a good thing. My intuition tells me, however that this is outsourcing even the offshore workers. I see third world moguls setting up sweatshops with terminals and a fiber connection and paying their mechanical turks only a fraction of what Amazon passes on to them...
This is a beta service, and my guess is that they haven't done enough market research yet. Maybe geeks like the idea of being an "artificial artificial intelligence", but I suspect that the rest of the world will see that phrase for the insult that it is. Amazon might as well have said: "Mechanical Turk: dumber than a trained monkey"! Maybe the 1.0 release will see a rebranding that emphasises the marketplace aspect and de-emphasizes the Matrix aspect of it all...
I think the technology is intriguing but no one should be surprised at the exploitative nature of its use by Amazon. Exploitation is what the market does and if Amazon isn't a capitalist enterprise then Bill Gates is the pope.