Reference Information:
Title:Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk
Authors: Joel Ross, Andrew Zaldivar, Lilly Irani, Bill Tomlinson, M. Six Silberman.
Venue: CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Summary: In the paper, Who are the Crowdworkers, the authors discuss Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" service. The Mechanical Turk service is a sort of "artificial artificial intelligence", it allows employers to hire out workers for small "Human Intelligence Tasks", or HITs, which are tasks that humans are specifically good at performing. Examples of HITs include photo tagging, transcriptions, paraphrasing articles, and captioning video. Due to the trivial nature of these tasks, the workers are compensated with as little as one cent per task, those the average price for a simple task is more around the dime area. More complex tasks pay upwards of a dollar.
Early on in the Mechanical Turk program, the demographic of workers skewed mostly towards younger, educated American women looking to supplement their income. As the program continued however, the demographic began to shift. At around the two year point, the service became popular with Internationals looking to increase their income so that they would have enough money to sustain on. In particular, young educated Indian men have started to carve out a sizable chunk of the workers on the service.
This raises some interesting moral implications for Mechanical Turk and similar competing services. While the original idea of paying people pennies per task in order to supplement their income works well when dealing with financially secure Americans, poor International workers depending on Mechanical Turk for their livelihood could be unfairly paid for the amount of work they put into the service. This is particularly an issue because the workers are anonymous, so demographic information is hard to come by. Even the authors of this article had to poll a somewhat small, self selecting group of individuals to come up with their information.
Discussion: This article was particularly interesting for me. Back when Mechanical Turk first premiered, I created an account and tried the service out. I think I only made a quarter or two, but it gave a pretty interesting insight into the service.
The tasks are fairly menial, as far as digital tasks can be at least. To make any "real" money on it, you'd have to spend several afternoons completely focused on it, not letting any distractions get in. Due to this fact, it's not surprising to me that poorer internationals are flocking to the service. It's a shame that this service is one of the few places they can turn to in attempts to supplement their income, so I do agree with the author's opinion that Mechanical Turk workers should be compensated more for their work if people are truly attempting to live off of it.
Another thing to consider though is that MTurks are treated as independent contractors, which means if they reside in the US and make more than 600 USD, they have to pay 15% self-employment tax and more as their earnings increase and they move into the next tax bracket, whereas someone who resides in India, doesn't have to deal with taxes and for the most part earns pure profit.
ReplyDeleteI found it odd that the overwhelming demographic early on was young, educated women with decent incomes. I don't see this job appealing to that demographic, what with its monotonous work with very low upside.
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