Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Alternatively, if you want to bolster human worker efficiency with an algorithm, might I suggest a filter that blocks Facebook on the company WAN link!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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!!!
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
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);
}
}
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.
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
There are many tasks where this is possible. I have never used the company in TFA, but I use Mechanical Turk all the time. My wife and I run a crowd-sourced educational website for young children. Teachers or parents can create and upload lessons, and use them and make them available for others to use as well. The exercise may require a child to match the word "pig" with a picture of a pig. But occasionally we get some joker who thinks it's funny to slip in goatse or some other porn so the kiddies can get educated in ways their parents may not approve of. So we pay people through MT to go through the images before they are available to the public. People are willing to do this for about 5 cents/image, and we have two people look at each image.
We also use MT to do translations. If we want a children's story translated into, say, Indonesian, we would have to pay hundreds of dollars to have it done professionally. So we just use Google Translate to do a rough translation, then pay three different Turkers to fixup the translation. Then we pay a few more Turkers to vote on with of the three translations is better. Anyone who consistently gets voted down is disqualified from any future assignment. This works well, is all automated, and if far cheaper than using a professional service. I also feel good about fact that we are helping dozens of poor people around the world to support their families.
As an aside: the default payment level for AutoMan is US minimum wage, and there is no built-in provision for differentiating wages based on the country of the worker.