Amazon is setting a wrong precedence which others are following[1]. When Bezos says "Your Margin is my opportunity.", he fails to mention who will be the loser. They have started a race to bottom which means employees/workers will be squeezed until their bones are dry.<p>I think this can be fixed simply by measuring companies on employment they generate and median tax payed per employee apart from the corporate tax. If they fall behind on these metrics, their products should be taxed heavily. If companies don't agree, they lose access to the market which will allow for local responsible companies to emerge and compete.<p>I am just wondering if my thinking is simplistic or this is a problem our leadership does not want to solve this issue?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sign-here-please-the-life-of-a-delivery-boy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/bAgZIMlCQu8weSTF7j750L/Sig...</a><p>edit: grammer
My mother had a job like this 30 years ago. She worked data entry as a keypunch operator. However, it was a full time job, above minimum wage, provided insurance and vacation time. Mechanical Turk relies on the race to the bottom, the fact that some people need any job to keep from being on the street. Of course companies love the gig economy, it keeps them from having to think of their workers as people.
75% of Turkers are Americans. And I didn't see it in the OP but I would guess that similarly 75% of companies issuing HITs are American.<p>Now I don't know the exact wording of minimum wage law, but I'm pretty sure if you hire an independent contractor through a 3rd party staffing company, let's say to clean houses. And then you set a fixed price on the service, say you will pay $20 for each house cleaned, knowing it takes 4 hours on average to clean a house. And then you let anyone who wants it take the job. This would be illegal.<p>So, I honestly don't know how mTurk is allowed to operate the way they do. American companies should not be able to hire American workers to perform labor at below minimum wage, just because they use an API to do it.<p>I'm willing to bet if someone was willing to spell it all out in front of the right AG or the right class action legal team that there would be significant settlements to be had.
Amazon could bundle Turk with it's other AI efforts to automatically train AIs alongside Turk problems to eventually take over the task or only farm it out when the model's confidence is outside a particular threshold.
It's a global platform for cheap human labor. I find it completely unsurprising that living off cheap labor alone would not result in a particularly good living standard, especially not in some of the most expensive locations in the world, and especially not when competing with cheap labor from across the globe.
In my company I have my own image labeling team in Poland and I pay $4 per hour. I can go down to $2.5. Median hourly rate of amazon mechanical turk is supposedly $1.38[1]. My dataset is harder to label than ordinary images, so it takes a few hours to ramp up the labeller. I have been contemplating migrating to mechanical turk for a while. Anyone have some experience to share?<p>1. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2167702612469015" rel="nofollow">http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/216770261246901...</a>
It'll be interesting to watch AI start edging out these jobs. What an interesting general AI project. Instead of a Turk, there will be a machine inside..
A bit of anecdotal insight: I have a relative who is psychologically incapable of finding a job due to fear of rejection, and will justify not applying for any job by considering how hard it would be to get a job. Quite literally he finds it more attractive to get a guaranteed minimum wage job than to apply and face possible rejection for a high paid job which he is qualified for.<p>I believe this same kind of pathological behavior is what's causing people (like described in the article) to stick with AMT jobs.<p>I wish I knew a way to break this vicious cycle :(
What a dystopian vibe. They were debating how long this type of work would be available, but didn't emphasize that ultimately it's a zero sum game.<p>Is anyone predicting when various jobs will fall to AI? I here about the 3 million truck drivers a lot. However I think some groups like radiologists are still underestimating the speed at which reading x-rays will become mostly a job of double checking computer interpretations.
If I close my eyes and imagine a world where Mechanical Turk doesn't exist, it's not clear to me how the people in the article are better off.