Salon has a fascinating article today about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is Amazon.com's on-line workforce project. Companies pay people pennies to carry out simple online tasks because it's cheaper than programming computers to do them. It takes its name from the 19th century fake chess-playing robot "The Turk". Excerpt from Salon:
The 21st century twist on the Turk, conceived by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, doesn't try to hide the people inside the machine. On the contrary, it celebrates the fact that we have become part of the machine. For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves "turkers," do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies have solicited workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon takes a cut from every task performed. [...]
To a labor activist like Marcus Courtney of WashTech, a tech workers union, the whole arrangement represents a dystopian vision of a virtual sweatshop. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," he says. "Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that's showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos' vision of the future of work, I think that's a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that."
Link: "I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Salon Technology.
Google has starting getting in on this type of action too, though perhaps less publicly. How long before someone proposes this scheme for Negroponte's future $100 laptop workforce?
The picture above is from The Sheep Market, a wonderful little art thesis project by Aaron Koblin. He paid online workers two cents apiece for 10,000 drawings of sheep, which he now offers for sale in sticker form for $20.
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