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Managing Human Workers With an Algorithm
New submitter prayag writes "With the advent of crowdsourcing platforms it has become easier for people to 'automate' simple, yet repetitive tasks that computers aren't good at by hiring thousands of people at once. This can help some business cheaply accomplish certain tasks, but it can also be misused by spammers. A company called MobileWorks is even outsourcing this concept, reaching out to workers in developing nations whose income needs aren't as high. 'Kulkarni, who founded the company in 2010 with fellow graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley, says the value of tasks is set so that workers can reasonably earn $2 to $4 an hour; payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries. "Even though they are acting as agents of a computer program, we are creating an opportunity for them," he says. MobileWorks charges its clients rates starting at $5 per hour for workers' time.'"
"clients rates starting at $5 per hour for workers' time."
Well, at least that prices out the sweatshops. Sorry, Nike and your ilk, you'll have to continue using your inefficient stuff.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries
There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Kill this concept with fire and nuke it from orbit, TYVM. The last thing this economy needs is to siphon more work while we have people who cannot find replacement work fast enough to justify this kind of stuff.
The only logic in this algorithm is that US citizens are considered persona non grata unless they want to forgo the 13th Amendment in the name of economics - much like the various programs that precede it. Given the other companies out there, this is an already solved problem for the Third World. What they fail to do is to solve it for the First World.
In addition, the only purpose that this could serve is spam.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The larger and wealthier they get, the more secure and generous giant international corporations will feel. Their titanic concentrations of wealth will trickle down to . . .
. . . oh, sorry, I can't type this shit with a straight face long enough to come to a decent snark.
This technique is yet another step down a road toward a world where callous corporations dominate all political and economic activity.
If you're hiring out to a part of the world you'll never visit and never know the people, you are going to miss out on spotting talent that can help your company grow. Our company has a very tedious and mind-numbing research project that is perfect for outsourcing, but we use interns from area colleges. The star players on the intern team shine through and are given a chance for employment. I guess that's the difference between looking at people as a long-term investment versus disposable labor though.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Reminds me of this novel from Brain Marshal:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That's not a good sign...
Is this the psychohistory we've been waiting for?
by any chance do you also have the names and addresses of those founders from Berkeley?
Algorithms / metrics don't work that well and people just end up gameing the metrics and not the real work they should be doing.
1. Manage human workers with an algorithm.
2. Manage algorithms with human workers.
3. Goto 1 until the Borg rule.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's called "citizen science," expanding the concept of things like SETI at home to drawing on the mass capability of interested people.
A good example is GalaxyZoo. People classify images of galaxies online.
Can we please just get the robotic-uprising-and-enslavement-of-mankind over with already and dispense with the assorted sordid intermediate steps?
At least that part will have laser guns and gigantic deathbots, rather than gnawing ennui and postindustrial globalized cube hell...
First of all, as someone who's work in parallel computing for a while, I think it's actually quite hard to define tasks that actually have value that can be broken down into such small and easy sub-tasks. And within the set of problems where you can do that, there is a pretty large overlap between what a completely untrained person can do and what a perl script can do. So the whole idea of an army of anonymous random humans adding microvalue that adds up to big value is problematic for me. Maybe there is theoretical value there, but so many things could go wrong.
Secondly, if you can clearly define a task like that, and what it is worth to you, why restrict your solution to humans? Provide an API and let me try to solve it algorithmically. If all you care about is getting the task done, what does it matter whether I get it done with a dozen Indian subcontractors, a thousand trained monkeys, or a clever little genetic algorithm?
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
How is this any different than Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk which does, seemingly, the same thing with human labor?
function manageWorker(worker)
while (worker)
{
worker.flog();
if (worker.isDead)
{
return;
}
else if (worker.morale == HIGH_MORALE || worker.productivity == HIGH_PRODUCTIVITY)
{
worker.goldstars++;
}
manageWorker(worker);
}
}
But corporate profit is the sole reason corporations exist (not for profits aside). Profit motive is the essence of market economies and utilitarianism - the essences of the American Way. Are you suggesting that the American Way is meaningless?
Not that I would disagree with you if you were, but just saying...
I dunno about you, but when I read that I see exploitation all over it
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There's nothing wrong with capitalism.
There is something wrong with corporations having unbridled power over governments, societies, people and the environment, manipulating them all to maximize the wealth of the executives. The root of the problem is that corporations are essentially amoral sociopaths with indifference to the means and only one objective: maximising the wealth of the executives.
That went by the wayside long ago, along with checks and balances and the constitution. Now there is nothing but corporate greed running the US and, thereby, the world.
This looks like a good example of economic arbitrage- with disparity in the cost of living, outsourcers like this can profit by buying low and selling high.
What's really interesting is if the compounded affects of the many businesses doing similar services as this one will infuse enough capital into these counties such that they can improve their own economic well being as we've seen happen in China, India and other places. If that happens (and the costs of living in various parts of the world stop being orders of magnitude different), outsourcing could stop being such an alluring thing.
On a similar note, ending the minimum wage in the US could help people who have no other options produce at least some income from jobs like this.
Have a read of Manna, by Marshall Brain ( How Stuff Works founder). It predicts workers being managed by computers, then extrapolates the results. The results aren't pretty.
First you actually have to go out and define the task to the point that someone who has little to no knowledge of your organization can actually do it, then you have to create the ad and most importantly WAIT for someone who has the right skills to come and accept it and then go through all the work of actually confirming the answer since you really have no trust relationship with the person who answered it, you are sort of going blind....
So not only does it not really save any time or money, you put your entire project at risk waiting for the answer. As the adage goes, time is money and if you are trying to save a few bucks using this model then you arent very smart with either.
Monstar L
That might be the quickest fix to global warming...
Bringing this concept home might not be so good either. Particularly if it goes like this.
There is one upside though. In theory it would eventually cut the unnecessary and wasteful cost overheads (like golden parachutes) associated with upper management. However since the least cost-effective personnel tend to make the decisions, it's unlikely to happen unless somebody starts a successful company with an AI as the CEO from the start.
...to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets...
Excuse me, but wasn't the computer spreadsheet invented because computers would be good at checking spreadsheets?
Their they're doing there hair.
Relevant - a related but different approach: AutoMan, a language for programming with people: http://www.automan-lang.org/
AutoMan is a platform for integrating human-based and digital computation. It allows programmers to "program with people", which appear to the programmer to be ordinary function calls. AutoMan automatically handles details like quality control, payment, and task scheduling. It is currently implemented as a domain-specific language embedded in Scala (a language that runs on any machine with a Java Virtual Machine), and uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a backend.
Technical paper at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/AutoMan-UMass-CS-TR-2012-013.pdf, to appear at OOPSLA 2012.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors.)
$2 an hour is better than a pack of rice for a whole week and an ak for the warlord (imo)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
And if one or two workers are constantly turning up correct results (assuming at a higher rate than their peers) or performing the task faster than their peers what stops you from contacting them for permanent employment?
The signal-to-noise ration got raised by no small amount (you have to be much better than your peers to be picked up as more than a statistical anomaly) but I see little reason what you suggest can't be done in the digital world.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-05-31/
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management