Human Workers, Managed by an Algorithm

It's all about how much you pay the turkers. I have done many studies on mturk and the quality of results have been very good so far. My secret? Pay people equitable wages.<p>I always do a small pilot study to find out how long on average does my task take people to do. Then price the HIT so that people can get at least $6 an hour, sometimes much more.<p>This way, I get high quality results very fast. For example, I posted 100 assignments at 11am today, each took about 10 minutes to do, and now it is 1:40pm, and I have already gotten all the results I need.<p>Compared with having to pay $20 for people to come to my lab for an hour, mturk is heaven.

Full circle.<p>Remember that the original 'computers' were people who performed computations.<p>If you recall Feynman's self indulgent book 'Surely you are joking' he has a chapter where he describes how they would write algorithms which were then run by humans operating adding machines while working on atomic bomb related problems.

Whilst waiting for my turn to order on a local subs restaurant, I saw something familiar. I was watching Big O live and in action. There were two cashiers. Each one greeted the customer differently. The lady on the right was faster, because she would ask yes or no questions. Then she would ask for payment type up front and prepare the ATM/credit card terminal in advance if the client said ATM/CC. The other cashier would just ask random questions in no particular order, and would wait until the last minute to prepare everything for the payment part of the transaction. She never had the pen at hand. Ever.<p>Two people. Same training ( I assume ), and two vastly different algorithms operating for the same goal. Imagine if a computer would take in the order. It would closely match the lady on the left POS terminal. She was as close as a computer anyway.<p>Her routine went a bit like this:<p><pre><code> (start transaction (greeting (choose sub type (type of bread (white or wheat) (any deviation from the STD ingredients) (? combo meal)) (? change chips for cookie) (? change soda for bottled water) (type of payment (prepare pen &#38; adjust terminal) (? ATM (get card ( swipe ( punch in numbers ( ? accepted || declined (goto start &#60;-- ) give customer card back ))))) (end transaction))) </code></pre> <i>I just realized how lispy this came out to be. :) </i>

Interesting that MIT Tech Review wrote an article on this, since a lot of great research (at various universities, including MIT) is now a lot easier due to easily available human task workers. Hopefully this will make research easier, maybe reduce grad-student drudgery, and speed up scientific progress for everyone. (Task work is useful for business, too, but it seems particularly useful in the same ways cloud computing is useful -- the ability to rapidly spin up a short-term task to handle load, without persistent staffing costs.)

I'm immediately reminded of Manna:<p><a href="http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm</a>

Add a couple more layers and you get... algorithms managing humans who control robots to clean for humans:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aqghgoeCWk&#38;hd=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aqghgoeCWk&#38;hd=1</a>

<i>According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings."</i><p>Rationally, this makes sense. Emotionally, I find it repulsive. I'm not sure which impulse is stronger.<p>I feel like if I were involved in this company, I'd have to focus to some extent on providing a leg up to people in developing countries. Turning people into (potentially miserable) cogs in a machine would weigh on me after a while.

Frederick Taylor would be proud:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management</a>

Interesting article, but somehow the comment section turned into a MobileWorkers commercial?