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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.'"
Call a waaambulance! Would you like some cheese with that whine? Seriously, you sound like buggy whip manufacturers must have sounded at one point in history. The collective whining in here is tiresome. The world is changing, technology is moving fast, and you can either cry your eyes out and demand the world must please stay the same, or you can deal with it pro-actively and learn how to take advantage of the changes. While you're busy whining here, somewhere else someone is figuring out how to improve the world and better their own lot simultaneously with these changes. And yes, the US is still a good place to do that.
This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept.
You mean out of all their many options ? Wow ... that must be so great.
Meanwhile you forget the other side of the equation : you are forcing others to also accept the lowest rate. You are essentially locking Americans (and Europeans, and South Americans, hell, at these rates, even Middle Easterners and and and ...) out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
There are these people, you may have met them, that do not have degrees, that do not have an Ivy League education ... and you are removing their options, reducing them to zero. After that, no doubt, you'll be telling me they're lazy and it's their own fault ... and hopefully at some point they'll show you that they're 98% of the population.
How is any of this "exploitation?"
Given the fact that that money will barely pay for living expenses in all but the most miserable locales their "choices" are reduced to nothing in practice. You get situations of workers building iphones who can't afford a single iphone after 12 months wages. You think that's somehow fair ?
Furthermore, that money will never pay, anywhere in the world, for decent medical care, for a decent car, for ... and so on and so forth. You're locking people out of the "western lifestyle" (you know the one you consider yourself entitled to).
And in places where this "standard of living" thing applies are hellholes like afghanistan or bad rural parts of China. If it applies in other places, that's temporary at best.
In short what is wrong with this : Manna