[frmersdog]

If there's any justice, a good number of comments will focus on the ethical nightmare MTurk turned out to be. Apologies to the people who worked on it, but it's fair and appropriate for observers to point out when someone has spent their time and energy creating something that is a net negative for the state of society. That's probably the case here.

[linkregister]

If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.

[mrdependable]

I have no idea what the situation was for people doing the work on mturk, but how far would your logic extend? Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk? If not, there has to be some ethical relationship between how desperate a worker is and how much you pay them. My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work. I don't get the feeling that was the situation.

[linkregister]

Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.

> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.

Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .

> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?

Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.

I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.

[larodi]

Happily I then can state we did create nothing based on MTurk as it had this negative ethical side to it from day one.

[maxrmk]

What do you see as net negative about it? I’m familiar with the product but not that aware of how it’s been used.

[akerl_]

It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans.

Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

[muzani]

Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks.

The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem here - factory workers would live in hostels, eat the free factory food or the cheap street food that cropped up near the area. They'd meet and marry other factory workers, have kids, who'd also work there. They were a modern little serfdom. Same goes for plantations.

Things like gig work and mturk were an exit from that. Not always leaving an unhappy or dangerous life, but making their own life.

If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

[akerl_]

> If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

This paragraph is so tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the issue. The fact that a company found someone willing to do a job for what they want to pay does not mean that it's ethical or moral for them to do so.

In this case (as in many others), one of the predicates was finding groups of people whose existing options, financial literacy, living conditions, or some combination of the three were already so bad that becoming digital serfs was a minor step up.

[frmersdog]

I got paid $11 an hour to enter handwritten applications into a database, as a temp job back in the early 2010s. It was "low-skill" inasmuch as, "Locking in and moving efficiently through entire filing cabinets of forms, often written by people whose first script was not Latin, for 6-7 hours straight, every weekday, for 2 months, with no prior training," is "low-skill" (and I apparently did it much faster than my supervisors expected). $11/hr was less than it should have paid, and yet I have to commend the company I was working with, because they sourced local labor and paid still multiple times what the job would have commanded through outsourcing via Mturk.

The conditions you're describing were caused by the systemic globalist status quo that Mturk is a part of; Mturk did not fix that, it perpetuated it.

[pacoWebConsult]

It's not a fraction of what it would cost to actually employ those humans, since there were humans who clearly chose to do that work when presented with the opportunity.

I think this is a very first-world oriented take. It efficiently distributed low-value workloads to people who were willing to do it for the pay provided. The market was efficient, and the wages were clearly on par with those who were doing the work found economical to do, considering they did (and still do) the work for the wages provided.

[amelius]

Yes, and "use the output of MTurk workers to make themselves redundant."

[ryandvm]

I feel like that's a good summary of Amazon in general.

[crossbody]

"probably". Care to provide reasoning or is this just a knee jerk reaction? Are you familiar with the service and how it works?

[edoceo]

These are extraordinary claims (yea?). I'm sure there are great stories of opportunity creation and destruction - how could we even measure the net effect?