From: Andrew Sawtelle
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:16 PM
To: Harold Pugh; Robert Leming; Seth Horwitz; Larry Goldfield; 'Ben Fritzson'
Subject: Amazon Mechanical Turk: analogous to an old Crew idea?

Hey all,

I was in my favorite lunch spot in downtown Providence (http://www.myspace.com/tacotruk) and came across an article in the College Hill Independent (http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/cms/The_College_Hill_Independent/Home.html) about the Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com). The article is below.

The AMT is based on a unit of work called a Human Intelligence Task or HIT. HITs sound very similar to the kind of volunteer task clearinghouse that we were talking about many months ago. I like the writer’s description of the HIT culture in the third to last paragraph: “The internet is now full of people scurrying around getting my sister a graham cracker.” It might be worth it at some point in our journey to look at this site, and other sites like idealist.org that are more geared towards people looking for volunteer or paid positions doing “activist work”.
For now, I’ll put this in the Star Café Tools under a write-in Function called “Volunteer Recruitment and Management”.
http://www.starcafe.org/crew/Lists/Star%20Cafe%20Tools/DispForm.aspx?ID=49
peace
Andrew

p.s. I love the illustration. Now I have a new picture for Andrew’s Slush Pile, my WSS 3.0 site.
http://wss30.starcafe.org/andrew/default.aspx

http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/cms/The_College_Hill_Independent/Features/Entries/2008/2/7_THE_TURKING_CLASS.html

Thursday, February 7, 2008
THE TURKING CLASS
AMAZON.COM GIVES THE HUMANS ONE LAST SHOT
BY ALEX EICHLER
ILLUSTRATION BY RAF SPIELMAN
You don’t need to be an avid consumer of science fiction to know that virtually every author and screenwriter who’s worked in the genre is scared of robots. This, at least, is the most plausible explanation for the thousands of human-versus-machine showdowns found in our depictions of the future. Whether it’s Asimov’s sexless Solarian society, James Cameron’s melty Teutonic man or the moody spaceships of Futurama, everyone’s pretty much agreed that our foreseeable relations with the computers will be rocky at best.
Against the coming red tide of electronic disdain for human life, though, there is a note of hope: Amazon Mechanical Turk, a job-listings service provided by Amazon.com. Mechanical Turk—named after the Turk, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 18th-century chess-playing mechanism that turned out to be a human-controlled hoax—was introduced in 2005. It offers users the chance to perform HITs—“Human Intelligence Tasks”—for private employers or, more commonly, businesses and corporations. It’s uncommon for workers (some of whom call themselves “turkers”) to receive more than a dollar for the successful completion of a HIT, and often the pay scale dips a lot lower. Still, Mechanical Turk has amassed a community of devotees, people who share tips and cautionary stories on Turk-centric message boards and seem genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of earning 20 cents an hour from a boss they’ll never see or speak to.
The Mechanical Turk phenomenon is compelling for a few reasons. It’s fair to wonder, for example, why anyone would volunteer their time for such minute compensation when a worker has virtually no recourse if a company decides not to pay up once a HIT has been completed. (In July 2006, Katharine Mieszkowski suggested in a Slate.com article how Mechanical Turk might look in this light like “a virtual sweatshop.”) Yet just as interesting as the psychology on which Mechanical Turk relies is the landscape described by the website’s HIT postings, a world filled with, as the home page puts it, “tasks that people do better than computers.” It’s a bit startling to realize that such tasks still exist, and that there are evidently enough of them to keep a network like Amazon’s in business. Curious about what kind of economy humans stand to inherit, I registered with Mechanical Turk and set about putting my nose to the grindstone in a way that robots can’t.
 

The lessons of Jughead
Recently I learned that the official website of the comic strip Archie features several blogs written in the voices of some of the comic’s most beloved figures. You can check in with Veronica or Reggie, or find out what, if anything, is on Betty’s mind today. (From an entry last month on Betty’s blog: “Well, it’s official—the January blahs have arrived in Riverdale. You know, I thought we were blah-proof here, but apparently that’s not the case. LOL”) The specific authorship of these journal entries is unclear, but we can probably assume that they weren’t written by a computer. Josh Fruhlinger, the man behind The Comics Curmudgeon (a blog that functions as a sort of Gawker.com for the funny pages), sometimes jokes about “the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000,” a machine responsible, in his speculation, for the surreal, humor-flavored tone of so many Archie strips of recent years. Fruhlinger’s joke neatly captures a sense of incredulity that I think many of us feel when we stop to consider some marginal aspect of American culture and realize that, yes, an actual person paid another actual person to create this.
I didn’t learn about Betty’s web presence through Mechanical Turk, but “content provider for in-character Archie blog” is the kind of thing that might get posted as a HIT there. A lot of the listings on Mechanical Turk seem to occupy a strange sort of shadow economy, where C-list websites and faceless entrepreneurs want to pay vanishingly small amounts of currency for tasks you’d never considered among the means by which someone could earn a paycheck. A company called “Maps Alias,” for example, asks workers to track down maps of obscure regions—Charentsavan, Armenia, say, or Yevlax, Azerbaijan—for what is apparently a global cartography project, although one would think that the labor involved in finding and scanning a paper map of Yevlax would be worth more than the promised reward of $2.50.
Another listing that I perused invites people to create brief multiple-choice guessing games for Guessnow.com, a website where users can predict future events and supposedly convert points, won for correct answers, into cash. Workers are paid seven cents for each quiz they devise. Guessnow asks questions like “In what year will Paris [Hilton] give birth to her first child?” and “Will Democrats in the US Congress be able to end the war in Iraq before the end of George W. Bush’s term as president?”—things about which you don’t necessarily need to know a lot in order to have an opinion. There is no qualitative difference that I can see between Guessnow’s basic business model and that of a gambling site. “We want CREATIVE people writing CREATIVE QUESTIONS,” the company’s listing on Mechanical Turk reads, after suggesting some of the possible categories of quizzes (“La Vida Latina”) and noting that “We are currently not accepting any questions regarding Terrorist attacks.”
The online-poker ads dancing in the margins of Guessnow’s home page at least offer a clue as to why the site’s proprietors would have an interest in generating traffic. Somewhat more inscrutable are the HITs offered by groups like VoiceByVoice, which promises rewards of up to $1.20 for people who call in and leave treasured memories on the company’s voicemail. “Tell us a favorite memory or story about your first love, a strong crush, someone that you were nuts about,” one listing reads. “They have to be a story, not just two sentences, etc.” It’s anyone’s guess what VoiceByVoice plans to do with these anecdotes, although elsewhere on Mechanical Turk they can be found asking for glowing reviews of Apple products. As with the Guessnow quizzes, or the Archie character blogs, this isn’t work that any computer could do, though it also doesn’t seem like work that any human would ever really want to do, or, indeed, need done.

Five cents a graham
It should be noted that not every listing on Mechanical Turk implores the user to participate in weird peripheral businesses for sums that wouldn’t purchase a bag of cough drops. Many of the HIT requesters appear to have intentions that are relatively honorable, if transparently about improving one’s own business in the face of competition, and many of the jobs are the kind of menial, incrementally useful tasks that once would have been performed by somebody like Ron Livingston in Office Space. One of the most common types of request has to do with search-engine refinement: users can view a product and come up with a list of intuitive words that would lead Googlers to the product’s page, or they can consider a query and a list of results, and rank the results by relevance. I performed a couple of HITs in this latter group at two cents a pop for a company called Powerset. The tasks felt like a basic-cognition test designed by a Wikipedia junkie. One query, “domestic airline safety records,” produced snippets about Pan Am, Jimmy Kimmel, the history of New Zealand aviation, and the legal status of the French language in Canada, which I ranked “relevant,” “not at all relevant,” “not very relevant,” and “not at all relevant,” respectively. Each HIT took about a minute to execute; if I’d spent an hour ranking search results, I would have earned a cool buck twenty.
Powerset’s website claims that it is developing a more accurate search engine based on “the structure and nuances of natural language,” so it makes sense for the company to beta-test its results on average-Joe users through Mechanical Turk. It was undoubtedly work that a computer couldn’t have done, and you can even imagine it being used to make someone’s life easier, in some abstract way, at some remote date. Many other HITs seem to be offered in a similar spirit of can-do democracy, although only you will know whether you want to write a hundred-word paragraph about the history and mean temperature of Alsip, Illinois for 40 cents.
At its best, Mechanical Turk seems like an avatar of Web 2.0—in which labor is distributed to the most willing, and information flows from the most knowledgeable—in its most notional, idealized form, except with somebody like Chloe, my 18-year-old sister, running things. Often when we’re watching TV together, Chloe will say: “Go get me a graham cracker and I’ll give you a nickel.” And I usually do it, because it’s a demand for something I can supply, and because hey, a nickel. When requesters on Mechanical Turk offer 30 cents for carpet odor-removal tips, or a shiny penny to anyone who can draw “an image that looks like another image,” it’s putting work in the hands of people who can do it, and paying about what you might expect to be paid for a small favor. The internet is now full of people scurrying around getting my sister a graham cracker.

Been a long time gone, Constantinople
After several weeks as a participant in the Mechanical Turk economy, my feelings about it remain mixed—even in spite of the sweet $0.17 I’ve earned, and now have to declare on my taxes. By most reports, the user base for Mechanical Turk consists primarily of bored cubicle-dwellers, whose mortgages most likely don’t depend on whether they can supplement their paychecks by mentioning some guy’s book on their blogs for 75 cents. From a user’s perspective, Mechanical Turk seems designed, and generally regarded, as a distraction for people in more or less sound financial comfort. Yet the atomization of the odd-job economy is not necessarily something we ought to embrace.
Five years ago, evaluating results for a startup search-engine company might have been something a person could spend eight hours a day doing, and draw a paycheck for it. It probably wouldn’t have paid enough to send our hypothetical worker to the Bahamas, but labor laws would have ensured that the hourly rate would have been at least more than two dollars. For someone unable to find work anywhere else, it might have meant the difference between security and insolvency. Now, thanks to Mechanical Turk, it’s a job that hundreds of people can do, and that one person, in a much realer sense, can’t. The demand has been fulfilled. Mechanical Turk is an example of the kind of innovation it serves to gather and focus, a leap forward in economic practice that a computer couldn’t have come up with. Yet the opportunism to be found there may provide a clue about who will win the coming robot wars, and why. Say what you will about machines, but at least they tend to look out for each other.
__________________________________
ALEX EICHLER B’08 is gonna haul ass to Lollapalooza.

Andrew Sawtelle
AFSC Star Cafe Pilot Assistant
www.starcafe.org
215-241-7253
asawtelle@afsc.org