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.'"

Comments

Hooray for Globalization

[TubeSteak]

payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries

There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.

Re:Hooray for Globalization

[BeanThere]

When did Slashdot become Marxdot?

And seemingly, anything vaguely Marxist sounding immediately gets modded up to +5. Yawn. I want to discuss tech news, but every single topic is becoming "death to Capitalism! Ra ra."

Re:Hooray for Globalization

[PopeRatzo]

When did Slashdot become Marxdot?

About the same time you got stupid from talk radio.

One thing about the Slashdot audience (aka "nerds") is they can figure out when something works and when it doesn't. Maybe it comes from debugging code or compiling kernels. And experience with the technology sector gives one direct experience with corporate excess and the dangers of concentration of corporate power. We see it every single day.
It makes it a lot easier to recognize that kind of FAIL in the wild.

You don't have to be a genius to know that "free market capitalism" isn't working as advertised, but if you are a genius, you have no doubt that it's broken.

Re:Hooray for Globalization

[PopeRatzo]

Just to clarify, by "you" I don't mean you personally (although I don't rule it out).

I refer to "you" as being the subset of people who believe it's even close to correct to call any criticism of laissez-faire "Marxism" as if the only possible alternative to the current corporate plantation system is Soviet-style gulags.

One clue for spotting stupid: when someone uses the term "Marxist", the probability of stupid approaches 1. It's the Godwin of economic discussions. (example: "Oh that Obama is nothing but a Marxist" or "Elizabeth Warren is a Marxist because she's trying to take away the banks' God-given right to rip-off customers".) Oh, and if you encounter the term "Muslim" in proximity to the term "Marxist" you have a stone-cold lock of the century of the week that you're dealing with mil-spec stupid.

Re:Hooray for Globalization

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

1. Recompiling a kernel and working in a company make you highly qualified in political and moral philosophy.

Yes. I have a low tolerance to Truthiness. If a device is not giving consistent results, it is flawed. If a program is giving inconsistent results, it is buggy. If a person is saying inconsistent things, they are liars. An IT background has forced this world view. Others will be less fault tolerant of people.

2. The current corporatist system we have is flawed. Because corporatism is flawed, some other thing that isn't corporatism is "broken"?

No. There may not be an "Unbroken System". But we should be filtering for flaws and implementing ways of removing flaws as quickly as possible. Something corporate lobbyists seem to be opposed to.

Yet another thing that doesn't help the US.

[sethstorm]

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.

Fear Not!

[StefanJ]

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.

Re:Fear Not!

[Anonymous Coward]

U r bang on except we arrived at the end of the corporate slavery road some time ago.

The feeling that we are not there yet is just a side effect of consuming popular culture/propaganda.

The fact is that even though we may only just be realizing how bad we are being fucked over by our corporate masters, they have been doing it to us for a while.

Leonard Cohen knew it.... The war is over, the good guys have lost, and everybody knows.

I'll stick to paid interns for this kind of work

[Rude Turnip]

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.

Feedback into Cybernetics

[istartedi]

1. Manage human workers with an algorithm.
2. Manage algorithms with human workers.
3. Goto 1 until the Borg rule.

Isn't this exploitation?

[Taco Cowboy]

... payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries

 
I dunno about you, but when I read that I see exploitation all over it
 

Re:Isn't this exploitation?

[ShanghaiBill]

I dunno about you, but when I read that I see exploitation all over it

This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept. The workers provide their own working environment, and the workers can take a break or stop working anytime they want. In many poor countries $3/hr is far above prevailing wages, and can support a standard of living that may surprise you. How is any of this "exploitation?"

Re:Isn't this exploitation?

[bkk_diesel]

Someone once gave me this thought experiment to help illustrate the problem.

Suppose a company on an alien planet decided to outsource production of some product to earth.
Further suppose that on this other planet gold was plentiful, and wages were measured in tons of gold per day.

Would social do-gooders on the alien planet be outraged that wages paid to earthlings were thousandths of what the wages would be on the alien planet?

Should they be outraged?

Further, would it be ethical on the part of the alien corporation to pay the same wages to their earth counterparts as was common on their home planet? ie. If they needed 100 humans to make their product, would it be ethical to make those 100 people the richest (most powerful) people on earth in the name of "equality" in their home society?

Usually when we talk about exploitation we are making an ethical judgement. There certainly has to be a point at which to offer substantially higher wages to a subset of a community becomes damaging to the community. The fact is (as ShanghaiBill points out below), the company offers poor people a chance to make money at a rate that they voluntarily accept. How is that exploitative?

Re:Isn't this exploitation?

[sFurbo]

In third world countries, tourists often tip e.g. rickshaw drivers handsomly, basically for the same reason that people want to pay much more to sweatshop employees. It quickly becomes apparant that driving a rickshaw is by far the best earning job for non-skilled, an perhaps even semi-skilled, labor. This drives more people to buy rickshaws, until an equilibrium is reached. As the hourly wage earned by driving around tourists is far higher than any other unskilled job, the equilibrium will consist of rickshaw drivers spending most of their time waiting for customers. The equilibrium ensures that the average wage is the same as for other unskilled work.

Now, compare the two situations, the one with and the one without the tourists. The wages for everybody is the same, but with the tourists, we have transferred a lot of people from productive work to unproductive waiting. This is harmful to the local economy. This effect happens even without the rickshaw drivers becomming the richest people around, it just have to pay markedly more than unskilled work does.

Or in short: If you are external to an economy, don't pay excessively for anything.

death to Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

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.