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Crowdsourcing Makes an API For Human Intelligence
holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in 'real time' with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms." Not a bad plan — sounds like they've lifted a page from the business model of captcha-cracking spammers.
that crowdsource tasks to workers in India.
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
I've had the misfortune of calling tech support centers located in India. These people had trouble following the simple scripts they were no doubt provided. That's a basic case of reading what's shown on a screen. How can we expect them to do tasks that are more complex than that?
Neat! The cut-up method lives on!
Are we Emergents, or are we Qeng Ho?
You don't want your data actually being seen by someone somewhere which is the case in many business applications I would think.
This is only really a viable solution while labor is cheap. As soon as labor gets more expensive so do costs. It won't take much to make it cheaper to hire part time minimum wage help to solve the same problems...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Crap.
Same as other crowdsourcing.
Sort of defeats the purpose though, doesnt it? The reason you would want software to do OCR is that the software is (almost) infinitely scalable. Humans are not. And if you are trying to break a captcha or something like that, even *a few seconds"(though I find their claim a bit dubious) still severely limits your effectiveness vs. smart software that can do it in a few microseconds.
Monstar L
Kinda obvious innit? You could easily have a normal website which from time to time pops up a question or whatever which you could answer for 5c or whatever. Easy job for poor people to do.
But this is not technology is supposed to work innit?
People will never be replaced by robots, because people are cheaper and you don't need to fix them when they break
Doing a dull job voluntarily for a salary you agree to is not the same as slavery or abuse.
really timothy? really?!!!!
maybe you should crowdsource your spelling and grammar checking to India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
Right, you do have a lot of bargaining power when your whole family is dying of hunger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop
I'm sure the workers all agreed to their salary.
+1 Make parent sticky please.
Crowdsourcing: Slavery 2.0 with a social component, taken to the cloud. You don't even have to own your slaves anymore, we take the burden of having to feed and shelter them from you! Also, it's much more scalable, you don't know how well your cotton field is going to do, so you can start with one and scale up blazing fast when you need more! And you only pay for what you use from them.
Neal Stephenson, thou art our Prophet...
I, for one, look forward to being hired as the voice for Nell's copy of the Guide.
Agree, your point is really well written.
I would mod you up but I don't have mod point. Hmm maybe that is a job for "MobileWorks"
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Then they can go starve, or try and hunt an animal for food in the woods. They are not chained and whipped while told to crowdsource tasks. It is not an inborn human right to have someone give you food to eat.
This is a tricky topic. Are people better off in an abusive employment relationship than in none at all? The fact that anyone agrees to enter one seems to suggest "yes", but there are all sorts of ways an employer might have indirect control over the other factors in their workers' lives which contribute to the duress which compels them to work. It's fraught with moral hazards. :(
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Somebody seems to have misappropriated Governor Perry's speech-writing application.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I will just leave this here http://www.mobileworks.com/fairtradework.html Full disclosure: I am one of the founders.
You've made two claims there that you have no evidence for.
1. That they're doing this voluntarily. Acquiescing to coercion and deprivation is not volition, no matter how much the abuser wants it to be.
2. That they agree to the salary. Ask people if they think their pay is fair. Most will say it is not, but what choice do they have?
I will just leave this here http://www.mobileworks.com/fairtradework.html [mobileworks.com] Full disclosure: I am one of the founders.
If not just a PR talking point, then I sincerely wish you the best of luck.
I see this as a much too slippery slope to tread lightly, though.
No need to remember anything anymore. Sorry, Phil.
Maybe you can crowdsource your post to India to make it readable next time!
It's not. We believe that paying fair wages would improve the quality of the work which is a very import value proposition for us.
Isn't the second quote that he makes enough many to survive month by month?
You've made two claims there that you have no evidence for.
1. That they're not doing this voluntarily.
2. That they don't agree to the salary.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Dude haven't you read about the attention deficit computers are causing, you think i can read all that text?!
He is talking about his first job. MobileWorks is like a second job for him which he can do from anywhere.
Have gnu, will travel.
You would have to assume the kind of workers being hired for this work have literacy and numeracy skills that mark them out as being above the physical-labor-sweatshop conditions that you're referring to there. The most likely employees for this work are middle-class mothers with some education background - at least high school - and with some free time while raising the kids. Who are you to begrudge someone to earn a little money for their time?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Interestingly, there's quite a lot in the UN Declaration of Human Rights but food only comes under Article 25, talking about maintaining an adequate standard of living. None the less, it's still in there.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Yea, a government making sure its citizens don't starve is socialist commie thinking, all hail the free market, saviour of the world.
I think we should add the right to cable TV (with HBO) and the right to free beer. What? Simply declaring that you have the right to something doesn't make it magically appear? Fine, let's start arresting people that violate my rights to whatever I want. ME! ME! ME! MINE! MINE! MINE! WAHHHHH!!!
Yea, a government making sure its citizens don't starve is socialist commie thinking, all hail the free market, saviour of the world.
If you don't work and nobody gives you any food because you're just a lazy piece of shit, you starve. I see no problem.
An AC made the original assertion, "Doing a dull job voluntarily for a salary you agree to is not the same as slavery or abuse."
Blair1q countered by pointing out that the AC has no evidence that the workers are doing the job voluntarily or that they agree with their wages.
You can't then counter that by saying, "but they might!"
Burden of proof lies with those who make the initial argument, not with those you happen to disagree with.
An interesting aspect of this concept is that it is fairly future-proof. Without changing the API, the company can change seamlessly the internal processes:
First getting humans to do tasks that are difficult for computers (like audio transcripts).
As computers improve in capability the humans can check the transcripts performed by computers, and use the feedback to improve further the capability of the computers.
And finally let the computers do the task without supervision and/or sell the software that has been developed to do it.
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So, I take it you have a better plan for how to take large amounts of money from developed countries (which are generally democracies, ruled by the stingy masses), and give them to people who need it?
Remember 20 years ago, when Taiwan was a sweatshop, and all your cheap plastic toys came from there? Now they are as well off as Hong Kong (i.e. close to the US in living standards, without the US's fucked up health system).
India might take longer to close the gap, but it will happen. Countries that don't trade with richer countries (say, North Korea) will take far longer to develop.
It *is* a very complex thing, though. But you can be pretty certain that anyone who says "Globalization is slavery" is even *more* wrong than the fools who say "More trade is always better".
In this case, the work is relatively safe, isn't causing much pollution, and isn't stripping finite resources. Compared to what mining companies do in poor countries, it seems like a good kind of trade.
It's done on a computer, why not disguise the worker's end of the project as a game? Then you make a Facebook app out of it. Instead of working for money, they get points. With enough points they can dress up their little cartoon character in some virtual swag and do other things in associated mini-games. Of course this is done while keeping in mind to exploit the other aspects of social media and some people's competitive nature. Also if you package it just right, not only can you get free labor but you might even be able to fool people into paying you to do your work.
Well, that is definitely a step in the right direction. What processes are in place to ensure that people are actually doing the work well? That's a big problem with Mechanical Turk.
Wrong, burden of proof lies on whoever makes the least likely assertion.
What if there are no woods because they've been logged, and no hills because they've been strip mined, and no fields because they're private property, and no beach to fish because it's been turned into condos for foreigners? Or, what if there are woods, but not enough animals there to support you and the other 142 million people who want to eat them too?
-- 77IM
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
AC was replying to the implication that crowdsourcing is analogous to slavery, or that this involves child labor, without any evidence or data to substantiate the claim. AC's point was that these guys are getting paid for a job they signed up for - Blair1q seemed to imply this was not the case.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
First of all treating your workers fairly, providing them support and helping them if they are stuck. We have a number of algorithms in place on top of that to make sure that the answers are high quality.
If this is anything like Digital Divide Data, then I wish you the best of luck. We studied the HBR case study (sorry, paywall) in one of my MBA classes, the prof was friends with one of the founders, they are doing good things.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
What is a "fair wage?" Locale, currency and quantity thereof per hour only, please.
that crowdsource tasks to workers in India.
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
Of course this business model could be abused to exploit people, but would this one be more likely to result in abuse than tech support or clothing manufacture?
So this seem designed for breaking capchas. Are they going to try to restrict the OCR function or ???
In what way is MobileWorks different to this?
You are going to have a very difficult time convincing advocates of "fair trade" that the solution to economies rife with fractional employment and piecework is more fractional employment and piecework.
Yes. We take care of all of the above. Locale, currency etc.
It seems that people never get taken advantage of in your world. I used to believe that I would get a fair deal if I worked hard, and learnt the hard way that that is not so, because sociopathy seems to be a trait of management. Strange how the "Just World" hypothesis works.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I don't trust shapeshifters.
If you are going to make a statement of fair trade and wages, it should be a trivial task to state that in precise terms. It is a fair question to ask, what a typical quantity of hours and remuneration your company considers "fair" in a given locale, say, Delhi, where roughly 300 INR / day (roughly 6 USD) is the legal minimum wage for labor requiring a secondary or higher education. If you cannot directly speak to that in terms that can be reconciled with the local prevailing labor standards, your vague marketing language assurances on the topic are quite worthless.
ERROR 666 -- an expression of type double or int per time unit was expected, but type "string of political BS" was provided.
Error message generated by Slashsource (TM)--ouch! Taco, quit beating me.
Then there are lots of people with jobs doing all those things. Why are you sitting on your lazy ass?
AC's point was that these guys are getting paid for a job they signed up for - Blair1q seemed to imply this was not the case.
By that logic, I should be able to whore out any woman for my profit. She keeps 20% and I keep the rest as a consultant fee for obtaining clients for her.
Wait, that would be illegal, wouldn't it? I believe the term for this position is not entrepreneur, but pimp.
Or do you support this?
Yes, there is a logical fallacy in the initial argument, but your counterargument has just as many. Just because someone consents to work, doesn't mean that they will not be exploited or abused. I can appreciate that you want a burden of proof, but I think you need to re-examine your stance as far as what you advocate for.
Every year it seems another one of "you" crawls out of the woodwork, astroturfing for an idea that doesn't happen in reality. Every year, I get to hear about how "fair" it is that people have a choice between starving or working in horrible conditions, yet the same people making this claim are so quick to point out how "life's not fair". Really, I'm tired of the semantical bullshit used to cover up what you really are - a closet fascist, and a poorly disguised one at that.
Orson Scott, whatever are you doing on Slashdot rehashing your old books?
I'd feel better about it if you quantified anything. There ain't many companies around who do -not- claim to pay fair wages, but there's widely differing opinions about what is "fair".
Your "pricing" page says nothing about prices, and you "fair wages" page says absolutely nothing about wages. Without a firm public commitment, it's impossible for prospective customers to judge your estimate of fair.
So, what is "fair" wages to you ?
Well, since you chose to advertise here, you can perhaps answer several questions.
How do you define the "sustainable" word that appears on your page? What does it mean, technically, in monetary terms? Minimum wage? X% over minimum wage? "Enough to sustain a person at poverty line +X% if he works 8 hours a day for us"? Or something else? Since you brag about it, you owe us some explanation. Without it your website looks like so much buzzword-compliant PR.
Are you considered an employer to the people who are "crowdsourcing" behind your API? By their government? Are you taxed on par with everyone else over there? Are you paying any kind of benefits on behalf of your "sustainably" employed workers, or do you free ride on whatever the local taxes are covering?
You mention you employ "engineers" and "medical students". If your project is indeed "sustainable", you should ensure not only that the people you hire can live "sustainable" lives (which, in the absence of other definitions basically means not starve to death), but pay enough so that their society as a whole can recoup the marginal expense for education, etc. on every dollar of revenue that you're paying them. When you say "sustainable" and claim "social mission", how do you factor those social costs into the wages that you pay?
How you determine what is "fair"? Do you just put a "task" and a "wage" and let people hire themselves? How do you manage shortage or excess of labor?
Your site mentions that your service helps people "develop" skills. From reading the page, which is rather thin on detail, it seems you claim to do so because you "keep the workforce happy". Excuse me, but that sounds like so much bullshit and PR. Can you give specific examples beside the "trickle-down" logic that you assume?
the problem is the scale, checking it up that people use it for financing their little girls education instead of using their little girls for the work is expensive and nigh impossible.
quick tip: that fair trade work page is cliche to the max with NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE, so if you're serious about the fairness add up some examples of actual pay for what kind of work. I mean, if you're not going to just sell captcha busting at floor bottom slavery prices.. More importantly, if it's not such slave work and the tasks are fit for daylight, where do I sign up as a crowd sourced worker?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But a worker that accepts one of these positions probably has nothing better, as as the saying goes: better crowdsourcing than no-sourcing.
Very true. Bottom line is that it takes two things to make a decent work available. An economy that makes it worthwhile employing people, and legislation to make sure that working conditions and levels of pay are reasonable.
If you were able to make a game enjoyable enough and successful enough to be able to do this you will make far more money selling said game then from crowd sourcing aspect of it.
Good business model, Is there any patent on that?
If you didn't post as AC your post could be used as prior art, you may have missed a business of a lifetime.
(Almost for sure that somebody will try a stunt like that one of this days... if is not already on the move)
Taiwan (and mainland China after them, and Japan before them) developed industry, and infrastructure, and education, and science that come with it. Sure, people wanted money from exporting industrial products, but the real trick was that they have developed things that are usable locally.
India has a huge chunk of its "export" in things that no one really can use locally, but foreigners can pay for -- call center script monkeys that basically shoo customers away without formally denying support, ultra-low-reliability software development, etc. It produces nothing but a stream of people trying to get into countries where those "services" are consumed (and then disappointment at seeing that no one wants to pay for it once they are there).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A couple of years ago I was involved with a project doing large-scale digitalization on old texts; we found that having it typed up by humans in India was more accurate than the OCR software we had available. We developed some software to streamline this process (mainly a dedicated editor that provided the markup we needed without unneccessary clutter).
You, sir, are too liberal for my liking.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I live in a third world country and I can assure you that $0.60/hour is not a fair wage in India.
Only a geeky version of intelligence. Real intelligence is not crowd-anything - it's individual
Isn't that basicly how Vegas makes it's money?
Well, that and hookers.
Then you live your life as a segment in the GHC ( Global Human CentiPad ). You subsist on what you must.
How long until the brave new world of purpose bred humans, or the brave new world of niches which require humans to evolve to fit them?
I wouldn't worry too much about that though. Machines can be designed to fill such roles faster than humans can change their genetic makeup by evolving. Drugs may alter humans radically enough to be marginally useful in the short term however - jobs too boring to be done well by humans may be done a little better by humans on speed. Lives too meaningless for humans to endure might be endured by humans on antidepressive medication.
Though 'many can't go there, and many would rather die,'
'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'
...
Seems like a lot of problems would have to be carfully mapped to such a systems... or, basically, you have to ask a crowdsource systems your questions carefully. It might be tempting to think that a crowd acts like a nondeterministic Turing machine, but it really doesn't because the space of possible solutions it might try to verify is bounded by the pool of respondents (not just the size of the pool, but what you might call the "imaginative range" of the pool). Oh, and this really reminds me of Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness in the Sky", in which a spacefaring civilization that figures prominently in the narrative uses human slave labor given drugs to give them something like autism or OCD as processing power (they're not the good guys...).
That the rep for the company, Prayag, is on this thread and answering questions and issues, but he doesn't respond to the question that keeps getting asked: How much, in numbers, is a "fair wage" for these workers?
Quit avoiding the question. Otherwise we are going to assume the only thing you've invented is the crowdsourced sweatshop (look, exploitative corporations! all the benefits of a sweatshop without having to rent or maintain a space!).
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
So is the future of this digging gold or writing term papers for athletic scholars?
I'd think most useful would be to hire PhDs or maybe sysadmins who are very well studied but live in places where a little money goes a long way in terms of standard of living.
You could even extrapolate this to allow someone in a cosmopolitan area to hire a colleague who has moved into the boondocks. No API for that yet though.. and APIs make people interchangeable which is a problem. Dooms this system to low grade jobs and low grade personnel perhaps.
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms"...
Yes. It means the kids are not in one place thus eliminating exposure to the public eye like say someone in prison.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136659787/report-chinese-prisoners-made-to-play-internet-games-for-guards-profit
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Have you met any humans?
There are quite a few whose "intelligence" (and I use that word in the most generous sense of the term) I would rather not have in my software.
There has been a lot of question about fair wage in the thread. So to answer everybody, the fair wage depends a lot on region, currency etc. We partner a lot of with local organization such as NGOs. Many of our members are house wives or are unemployed for whom the big difference having no access to work at all. Average wages vary from $1.50 to $2 per hour (this is in developing countries mind you).
" import value proposition" Oh, you people who spout big, ambiguous words thinking that it confuses the rest of us stupid people.