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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?
People will never be replaced by robots, because people are cheaper and you don't need to fix them when they break
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.
Tech support wasn't much better when it was done in the US, in the 1980's. You got the same morons but they cost ten times more. The problem is not India, it's the type of person who lands a job in tech support.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I will just leave this here http://www.mobileworks.com/fairtradework.html Full disclosure: I am one of the founders.
No need to remember anything anymore. Sorry, Phil.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.