from Hacker News

Who Makes Below Minimum Wage in the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop?

by narad on 7/5/13, 1:12 PM with 91 comments

• by hooande on 7/5/13, 3:22 PM

  Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and formulae, but in most cases the key issue is having enough data. It doesn't matter how fancy your technology is if you don't have lots and lots of clearly labelled samples.

  Mechanical Turk (and crowdflower and a few other services) are important bridges for this. People can do important labeling and cleaning work for a cost that's affordable enough to be practical. Right now most of the work is translation, address finding or quasi spammy tasks. But the service itself has a lot of potential to do things that impact our lives in the future. Mechanical Turk workers can improve startups by helping with personalization and automation tasks, help with science and defense by labeling images and aid in all kinds of language processing and computer vision tasks that could make things cheaper and better for all of us.

  It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage. Though I'm not sure that things like this are what the minimum wage was designed for. Completing online labeling tasks is a far cry from working in an actual sweat shop. It would be nice if there was some sort of exception for technical piece work. Mechanical Turk isn't nearly popular enough right now, but in the future as machine learning becomes more common there will be a serious demand for these tasks. I hope we can find a way to let people do data preparation work while avoiding virtual dickensian conditions of a kind of data processing industrial revolution.

• by incision on 7/5/13, 1:42 PM

  I've been fascinated by the mturk concept since it launched. I sign in from time to time and complete tasks that look interesting.

  Unfortunately, the service is flooded with $0.02 spam tasks (Register an account and post ad-copy on a specific forum etc). The highest paying single tasks routinely involve translation/transcription of Arabic.

  The most I made from a single task was about $2.30 for 10 minutes, part of which was completion of a pre-screening task to demonstrate a certain level of English reading comprehension.

• by leot on 7/5/13, 7:25 PM

  Concerns are misplaced for many reasons.

  1) no supervision

  2) no dependency on any particular employer

  3) ability to choose what to work on

  4) ability to choose own hours

  5) intrinsic trade-off between job compensation and the speed at which the job will be completed

  6) no requirement that the worker be doing the task exclusively -- the could be watching TV, or chatting with a friend, or playing a video game

  7) No possibility of employer coercion

  Here's another scenario: say you were paid to watch ads. Should that be subject to minimum wage laws? Well, clearly not: we're routinely paid $0 for the ads we're subjected to.

• by karolisd on 7/5/13, 2:31 PM

  Like Airbnb takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of places to sleep, like Uber takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of driver's time, Mechanical Turk takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of people's minds. But is it as profitable?

  Why isn't there something that makes it super simple for me to take surveys on my phone while I wait somewhere? I'd rather answer some marketing questions for a quarter than play Dots as I wait to meet a friend.

• by danielharan on 7/5/13, 2:50 PM

  Exactly right: concerns about minimum wage are misplaced when the workers are foreigners. CloudFactory in Nepal pays workers about $1/hour (disclaimer: visited them, think they're cool, no other affiliation). Terrible for US workers, more than being a high school teacher in Nepal.

  What concerns me more is how all these systems are difficult to use and built for humans to complete tasks. The next revolution should be letting programmers use AIs.

• by mkoble11 on 7/5/13, 5:00 PM

  While on the subject of mturk, you might find this useful: "Running Experiments Online Using Amazon Mechanical Turk" https://sites.google.com/a/cognitivescience.co/knowledgebase...

  Found it the other day via Steve Blank's amazing list of startup tools/resources:

  http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/

• by ck2 on 7/5/13, 3:05 PM

  I don't think it's just companies online who use "independent contractors" to dodge minimum wage. I believe I've seen it firsthand at Walmart where certain staff are replaced by contracted workers.

  Next year the big scam is going to be everyone only works 29 hours. Because at the 30th hour the corporation has to contribute towards health care.

• by jgh on 7/5/13, 3:08 PM

  Last time I checked you could do pretty good with the audio transcription tasks if you have the knack for it (minimal stopping/replaying parts). The surveys usually aren't worth it but sometimes you'll get one that's only a couple of questions..

• by jrokisky on 7/5/13, 5:51 PM

  I did Mturk for a few months while traveling. Occasionally I was able to make ~7.00 an hour, but the average was closer to 2.50. The work is mind-numbing and underpaid.

• by nawitus on 7/5/13, 5:16 PM

  Has anyone made an AI that can complete some of the tasks?

• by n3rdy on 7/7/13, 5:14 AM

  You may not make minimum wage recycling cans either, so lets shut down those bottle and can returns too!

• by cm2012 on 7/5/13, 5:32 PM

  You can do minimum wage if you write proper english for some of the description stuff.