My Own Pirate Radio

In his book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman explains how many IT businesses are shifting slices of their operations “offshore” to get work done for lower cost. For instance, the straightforward bits of your tax return might well be done overnight in Bangalore, India instead of Bangor, Maine. Cheap computing capability, cheap network bandwidth, and millions of well-educated people in developing countries are greasing the skids. (There, I just saved you a 469 page ramble.)

Amazon has put a new twist on this trend. They’ve just released a beta service called Mechanical Turk that acts as a job marketmaker for people willing to do bite-sized “human intelligence tasks” (HITs). You sign up, do a task, and get paid for it. InfoWorld’s David L. Margulius calls it “webshoring”. Here’s how Amazon describes it:

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.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.

Clearly the marketing department hasn’t scrubbed this one yet. Whoever put this together would probably have named it “The Borg” if the URL wasn’t already taken.

So is the work palatable? Like David Margulius, all of the HITs I found were photo recognition jobs for A9, Amazon’s search engine subsidiary. At $0.03 a shot this is not a get rich quick scheme.

I’m not sure yet how to feel about this one. Done right, it should net out to a good thing, since it creates a market and jobs (microjobs) where none existed before. However, like offshoring, it raises ethical questions. What sort of work is it kosher to market this way? Should there be a minimum wage condition, or is that just denying jobs to people who need them? Is it OK for Amazon to charge a 10% commission on every transaction, or is that usurious? (Imagine a recruiter getting an ongoing 10% of your salary, every year.) Should the price offers be made to float as they would on a real job market, so as to match supply and demand? And what does mindless repetition of bite-sized tasks do to your state of mental health?

I guess we’ll find out, hopefully before they bring it out of beta.