Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

I recently found out, through one of the referrers of my website, the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. Never shy of a new expe­rience, I reg­ister to see by myself what it’s all about.

The premise is simple. Some jobs cannot be auto­mated by machines (doesn’t sound too bad to me) and are rel­a­tively simple to be done by humans —and we’re not talking of playing chess (the origin of the “turk” moniker.)

These simple tasks are given to people to be done for a small fee.

I found some search results rel­e­vance anno­tation, a funny “find this movie’s quote in youtube” that was inter­esting to review some classics (not so much funny when I spent some time to find the exact time of the “I wish I knew how to quit you” in Brokeback Mountain only to dis­cover the embed link wasn’t here — there is some irony in that quote).

Anyway, long story short, after 2 days of playing with it in my spare time, I’ve got…
$0.19 on my account. Wow.

Now, I know for some coun­tries, 1$ is worth quite a sum, but that made me wonder what could motivate people to work for such a misery.

Of course, you have great free software around there that were developed thanks to the ded­i­cation of unpaid workers (the GNU com­munity and so on), but they are doing some­thing that is most likely a passion for them. Now, I have some trouble thinking this could be someone’s passion

I mean, if you want to do some­thing as a pass-time for a better world, there are better outlets. Like, perhaps you don’t know, but there is this project named reCAPTCHA which adds some intel­li­gence into the old age battle against the spam coming in your inbox.
Usually, to dis­tin­guish from people and auto­mated spamming bots (robots), you can ask people to solve a little problem: read some twisted barely legible letters, or do some maths, make a dance or whatever… But there, the guys thought that it was an awful waste of intel­li­gence (like dancing alone while you could power a dis­cotheque with your mindless wig­gling.) And they devised this sly method of using your intel­li­gence to help dig­itize books. It’s all explained on their website (the catch is that there is one answer that is known by the system, and the other one is sta­tis­ti­cally matched from your results and others’).

Later, I found an inter­esting article on the Amazon MTurk phe­nomenon (I make $1.45 a week and I love it by Katharine Mieszkowski). Apart from the fact that there are indeed people who do this as a pass-time, instead of watching TV for instance, there was a somewhat dis­turbing aspect to this.

A guy created a project where he asked to “Turkers” to draw sheep for a $0.20 each. At the end of his exper­iment, he con­tinued by selling them for a hundred times more on his website, to prove his point —which he legally had the right to do, as you waive your rights in the user agreement you never read

Funny or not so funny story… funny to those who think there won’t ever be people to do the most stupid jobs; not so funny when we see that the machine doesn’t have ghosts in it (con­sciousness, as in Ghost in the Shell).

It’s funny when it’s about finding movie quotes, but when it’s about being paid to write blogs on self-defense weapons, or catching emails… Where one draws the line?

Perhaps we’ve already been in a Turk machine for too long…

written by Yuki \\ tags: amazon, consciousness, task, turk