A recent ProPublica story describing the use of Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” for data-driven reporting projects (that’s mTurk for short). I had never heard of it before, probably like many of you.
For those unfamiliar with Mechanical Turk, it’s an online marketplace, set up by the online shopping site Amazon, where anyone can hire workers to complete short, simple tasks like quickly transcribing interviews, copying data from thousands of charts, and even sorting through satellite images in hopes of locating missing individuals. Amazon originally developed it as an in-house tool, and commercialized it in 2005. The mTurk workforce now numbers more than 100,000 workers in 200 countries.
In the ProPublica example, “a project we estimated would take a full-time staffer almost three days to finish was completed on mTurk overnight for $37, with 99 percent accuracy.”
But this generated several thoughtful comments expressing mixed feelings about utilizing this kind of cyber piecework. This one is typical:
My emotional reaction to mturk is that knowing another human as only an ID number on the other end of some mysterious online labor market is a bit weird. I haven’t made up my mind about it, but it’s all a bit unsettling. I’d like to think that an organization as generously endowed as ProPublica could afford to pay minimum wage to someone looking to leverage data grinding experience into a career in journalism (that’s how I started my career, FWIW), but if they can’t, or if my experience is out of date, well okay. And I know nothing about the labor conditions for the workers on the other end. Maybe it’s an ideal setup for them, I really don’t know.
ProPublica has also made available its own Guide to Mechanical Turk, describing the process of harnessing the power of this system.
Using Google’s blog search, you can find many different examples of mTurk in use. Here’s one describing its use in blogging a conference. Interesting stuff.
I wonder if any reporters in Hawaii have used mTurk for reporting projects?
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There is something monstrous about easy outsourcing of tasks like this, even if they are mundane. We are looking at a wholesale destruction of jobs and wages in this country if this takes hold. I honestly have to wonder if these kinds of things should be legal. Of course, how can you possibly enforce a law against it?
This is really frightening, for the American working class. Just terrifying. The ones at the top of the global food chain have the furthest to fall.
Something about this makes me think of the SETI project whereby massive reams of data are farmed out to untold numbers of PC’s (with their owners’ agreement, of course) and the search thru that data for extraterrestrial life is conducted in the late night hours while the PC is unused (or so we think).
Of course, the apparent difference is that the SETI search costs nothing and is likely to find . . . . nothing. mTurk, on the other hand, costs something and is likely to produce . . . . . something.
I hate to say it’s the “wave of the future” but it’s the . . . . wave of the future. The people doing this work in these far-flung places have every right to eat, breathe, live, and make a living as we do, assuming basic standards of labor fairness to them are observed. If we want to continue to live that charmed life, we have to develop new skills, products, and technologies that others don’t yet have. That’s the leadership we claim as our birthright, not doing mTurk-like piece work. Anybody can do that. And, like immutable laws of physics, anybody will.
Easier said than done. Not everyone can be a leader or an innovator in a given community, no matter where that community is. You can’t only have chiefs in a community. This looks like yet another huge income wedge.
One method of regulation here would be the imposition of labor tariffs .
I would think the various free trade agreements in place would prohibit labor tariffs.