Crowdsourcing Makes an API For Human Intelligence 123
holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers in India. Unlike Amazon's Mechanical Turk, jobs can be sent in by software without human help and can also be completed in 'real time' with a turnaround of a few seconds. The company claims that for problems like OCR and image recognition it makes more sense to find ways to use human intelligence than developing complex custom algorithms." Not a bad plan — sounds like they've lifted a page from the business model of captcha-cracking spammers.
Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! (Score:5, Interesting)
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
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Doing a dull job voluntarily for a salary you agree to is not the same as slavery or abuse.
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Right, you do have a lot of bargaining power when your whole family is dying of hunger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop [wikipedia.org]
I'm sure the workers all agreed to their salary.
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Interestingly, there's quite a lot in the UN Declaration of Human Rights [un.org] but food only comes under Article 25, talking about maintaining an adequate standard of living. None the less, it's still in there.
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What if there are no woods because they've been logged, and no hills because they've been strip mined, and no fields because they're private property, and no beach to fish because it's been turned into condos for foreigners? Or, what if there are woods, but not enough animals there to support you and the other 142 million people who want to eat them too?
-- 77IM
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Then you live your life as a segment in the GHC ( Global Human CentiPad ). You subsist on what you must.
How long until the brave new world of purpose bred humans, or the brave new world of niches which require humans to evolve to fit them?
I wouldn't worry too much about that though. Machines can be designed to fill such roles faster than humans can change their genetic makeup by evolving. Drugs may alter humans radically enough to be marginally useful in the short term however - jobs too boring to be don
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This is a tricky topic. Are people better off in an abusive employment relationship than in none at all? The fact that anyone agrees to enter one seems to suggest "yes", but there are all sorts of ways an employer might have indirect control over the other factors in their workers' lives which contribute to the duress which compels them to work. It's fraught with moral hazards. :(
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Very true. Bottom line is that it takes two things to make a decent work available. An economy that makes it worthwhile employing people, and legislation to make sure that working conditions and levels of pay are reasonable.
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You would have to assume the kind of workers being hired for this work have literacy and numeracy skills that mark them out as being above the physical-labor-sweatshop conditions that you're referring to there. The most likely employees for this work are middle-class mothers with some education background - at least high school - and with some free time while raising the kids. Who are you to begrudge someone to earn a little money for their time?
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So, I take it you have a better plan for how to take large amounts of money from developed countries (which are generally democracies, ruled by the stingy masses), and give them to people who need it?
Remember 20 years ago, when Taiwan was a sweatshop, and all your cheap plastic toys came from there? Now they are as well off as Hong Kong (i.e. close to the US in living standards, without the US's fucked up health system).
India might take longer to close the gap, but it will happen. Countries that don't trade
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Taiwan (and mainland China after them, and Japan before them) developed industry, and infrastructure, and education, and science that come with it. Sure, people wanted money from exporting industrial products, but the real trick was that they have developed things that are usable locally.
India has a huge chunk of its "export" in things that no one really can use locally, but foreigners can pay for -- call center script monkeys that basically shoo customers away without formally denying support, ultra-low-re
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You've made two claims there that you have no evidence for.
1. That they're doing this voluntarily. Acquiescing to coercion and deprivation is not volition, no matter how much the abuser wants it to be.
2. That they agree to the salary. Ask people if they think their pay is fair. Most will say it is not, but what choice do they have?
Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! (Score:4, Insightful)
You've made two claims there that you have no evidence for.
1. That they're not doing this voluntarily.
2. That they don't agree to the salary.
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An AC made the original assertion, "Doing a dull job voluntarily for a salary you agree to is not the same as slavery or abuse."
Blair1q countered by pointing out that the AC has no evidence that the workers are doing the job voluntarily or that they agree with their wages.
You can't then counter that by saying, "but they might!"
Burden of proof lies with those who make the initial argument, not with those you happen to disagree with.
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AC was replying to the implication that crowdsourcing is analogous to slavery, or that this involves child labor, without any evidence or data to substantiate the claim. AC's point was that these guys are getting paid for a job they signed up for - Blair1q seemed to imply this was not the case.
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You, sir, are too liberal for my liking.
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+1 Make parent sticky please.
Crowdsourcing: Slavery 2.0 with a social component, taken to the cloud. You don't even have to own your slaves anymore, we take the burden of having to feed and shelter them from you! Also, it's much more scalable, you don't know how well your cotton field is going to do, so you can start with one and scale up blazing fast when you need more! And you only pay for what you use from them.
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It's done on a computer, why not disguise the worker's end of the project as a game? Then you make a Facebook app out of it. Instead of working for money, they get points. With enough points they can dress up their little cartoon character in some virtual swag and do other things in associated mini-games. Of course this is done while keeping in mind to exploit the other aspects of social media and some people's competitive nature. Also if you package it just right, not only can you get free labor but you mi
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Agree, your point is really well written.
I would mod you up but I don't have mod point. Hmm maybe that is a job for "MobileWorks"
Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! (Score:5, Informative)
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If not just a PR talking point, then I sincerely wish you the best of luck.
I see this as a much too slippery slope to tread lightly, though.
Re:Why not Chinese prisoners? Even cheaper! (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't believe that was the question. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are going to make a statement of fair trade and wages, it should be a trivial task to state that in precise terms. It is a fair question to ask, what a typical quantity of hours and remuneration your company considers "fair" in a given locale, say, Delhi, where roughly 300 INR / day (roughly 6 USD) is the legal minimum wage for labor requiring a secondary or higher education. If you cannot directly speak to that in terms that can be reconciled with the local prevailing labor standards, your vague marketing language assurances on the topic are quite worthless.
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From the page he gives, the system is under development. Quantifying a fair wage taking into account locales and currency is far from a trivial problem. So it seems quite reasonable that the answer isn't yet finalised and it's something they want to announce when they're ready.
Whilst you're right that there's nothing we can judge here until those details are announced, the tone of your message does seem to be rather negative. The desire to pay fair wages is something that should be encouraged, not something
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The desire to pay fair wages is something that should be encouraged, not something that should cause one to be treated with suspicion over.
Actually, any propaganda from a corporation should be treated with suspicion.
And I do not mean this in a "purely negative tone", I mean it in the helpful sense that you should always question authority, and authorities who teach not to question should be severely inspected.
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I'd feel better about it if you quantified anything. There ain't many companies around who do -not- claim to pay fair wages, but there's widely differing opinions about what is "fair".
Your "pricing" page says nothing about prices, and you "fair wages" page says absolutely nothing about wages. Without a firm public commitment, it's impossible for prospective customers to judge your estimate of fair.
So, what is "fair" wages to you ?
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Solution to underemployment (Score:2)
You are going to have a very difficult time convincing advocates of "fair trade" that the solution to economies rife with fractional employment and piecework is more fractional employment and piecework.
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For poor people we call it "fractional employment and piecework"
For the working class we call it contracting.
For the middle class we call it consulting or freelancing.
Surely the classic problem in the third world is not the mechanics of payment for work done. It's that they are poor because there is little work and/or the work is poorly paid. New fair trade initiatives DO incrementally tackle these problems regardless of whether they are piece work, hourly paid or salaried.
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Well, since you chose to advertise here, you can perhaps answer several questions.
How do you define the "sustainable" word that appears on your page? What does it mean, technically, in monetary terms? Minimum wage? X% over minimum wage? "Enough to sustain a person at poverty line +X% if he works 8 hours a day for us"? Or something else? Since you brag about it, you owe us some explanation. Without it your website looks like so much buzzword-compliant PR.
Are you considered an employer to the people who are
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the problem is the scale, checking it up that people use it for financing their little girls education instead of using their little girls for the work is expensive and nigh impossible.
quick tip: that fair trade work page is cliche to the max with NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE, so if you're serious about the fairness add up some examples of actual pay for what kind of work. I mean, if you're not going to just sell captcha busting at floor bottom slavery prices.. More importantly, if it's not such slave work and the
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that crowdsource tasks to workers in India.
Say, I have this great idea for harvesting more cotton by "crowdsourcing" the task to imported workers from Africa...
Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms" from a reason to boycott a company, to a patentable business method?
Of course this business model could be abused to exploit people, but would this one be more likely to result in abuse than tech support or clothing manufacture?
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Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms"...
Yes. It means the kids are not in one place thus eliminating exposure to the public eye like say someone in prison.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136659787/report-chinese-prisoners-made-to-play-internet-games-for-guards-profit [npr.org]
Re:Doesn't sound very promising. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I have to agree. The 80's and early 90's tech support was superb compared to today. I was often able to get a completely new compiled app from the vendor within 4-6 hours of reporting an issue with them. Even calling Microsoft was easy and you were likely to actually get to talk to the coders involved with the product itself on the phone if you did your due diligence at determining the problem.
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Heck, back in the late 70s I called up Microsoft with an question about BASIC and Gates answered the phone and the question.
Can't say THAT ever happened again.
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Did he ask you if you actually paid for it?
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Yes he did, it was the paid copy that we ran on the computer club's Altair.
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These were some IT related requests.
Now's the time to ask ourselves... (Score:1)
Great unless... (Score:1)
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Temporary Solution (Score:2)
This is only really a viable solution while labor is cheap. As soon as labor gets more expensive so do costs. It won't take much to make it cheaper to hire part time minimum wage help to solve the same problems...
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Solution: keep people in poverty, prevent local economy from developing, pay local elite generously so they will help you to enslave the rest of the population.
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This is nothing like "side effects of communism". If anything, I AM a "side effect of Communism" (really Socialism as implemented by Communists). Thanks to them, I have education that is no longer available anywhere in the world, and I got it all for free.
Communists, of all people, actually bothered with supporting education and development of industry just because it's written in their platform.
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Communism goes against basic human nature - greed.
This is what Capitalist propaganda tells you. Greed is not inherited from animal instincts, therefore it has to be learned.
Democracy & Capitalism while still problematic uses human greed as a way to fuel economic growth.
That ship already had sailed. Modern Capitalism completely defeated the mechanisms that did, or could direct motivation by greed toward anything that benefits the society, and modern propaganda defeated everything that has a chance to threaten election of the incumbent elite's representatives. For all practical purposes we are back to the Middle Ages society -- small aristocracy control
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No. It is an evolved trait and can be explained through our empathy circle which starts at self and expands to immediate family then extended family / friends then neighbors (or w/e), etc, etc. Being selfish is an advantage in the evolutionary sense. If you're in a famine, you don't give your food to your neighbor - that would mean you die and not pass on your genes. If you stop to help someone being attached by a predator, you would die too, etc. There is a slight difference between selfishness and greed, but you get the picture. Self-preservation is a powerful instinct hard to unlearn and linked to many of the common human failings. And Yes, Altruism is also an evolved trait, but it evolved much later for different reasons.
This is a load of bullshit. Humans evolved from social animals, so evolution favored not individuals but populations most suited to survival in adverse conditions. When most of the herd, or village, is dead, the survivors are not going to produce more offspring than population where survival rates are higher. Furthermore, within every society only a small percentage of individuals can have significant amount of powerlust, and even those would not be greedy, as it happened only much later in human history th
Scaling (Score:2)
Very obvious, very wrong (Score:2)
Kinda obvious innit? You could easily have a normal website which from time to time pops up a question or whatever which you could answer for 5c or whatever. Easy job for poor people to do.
But this is not technology is supposed to work innit?
Douglas Adams Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
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You would be right, if our rulers gave a rat's ass about our health. I don't know what country you live in, but in the good ole US of A, roughly half our government is devoted to torpedoing the wildly popular public options while deregulating the private companies so that they can rape us even more in the future.
We're going back to the Gilded age. If you're not in the top 1%, you are disposable. Work till you can't work no more, then kindly find a hole to die in.
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Who needs healthcare? Just replace your aging human with one of the newer, higher-efficiency models that become available every year.
-- 77IM
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India will catch up in this area too...they're already the diabetic capital of the world [upenn.edu], importing American style lifestyle diseases at a good clip. All they're really missing now is a good corn industry subsidy so that they can make everything with high-fructose corn syrup in it!
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Lots of sick days for outsourced employees in the developing world, eh?
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People will never be replaced by robots, because people are cheaper and you don't need to fix them when they break
hahahahahahahaahah. but people who build robots build other things cheaper and better. see ford vs. vw.
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but they're slower, less accurate, can't work 24/7/, might sue, and take time to train. And they're only cheaper...for now.
sounds like they've lifting?! (Score:2)
maybe you should crowdsource your spelling and grammar checking to India.
We Can Recognize It For You Wholesale (Score:3)
No need to remember anything anymore. Sorry, Phil.
But I'm just ... (Score:2)
Future-proof (Score:1)
First getting humans to do tasks that are difficult for computers (like audio transcripts).
As computers improve in capability the humans can check the transcripts performed by computers, and use the feedback to improve further the capability of the computers.
And finally let the computers do the task without supervision and/or sell the software that h
solve capcha api? (Score:1)
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Manna, by Marshall Brain (Score:2)
It sounds a little cruel (Score:1)
But a worker that accepts one of these positions probably has nothing better, as as the saying goes: better crowdsourcing than no-sourcing.
Interesting development (Score:2)
A couple of years ago I was involved with a project doing large-scale digitalization on old texts; we found that having it typed up by humans in India was more accurate than the OCR software we had available. We developed some software to streamline this process (mainly a dedicated editor that provided the markup we needed without unneccessary clutter).
Limited applicability, or effortful (Score:1)
Has anyone else noticed... (Score:1)
That the rep for the company, Prayag, is on this thread and answering questions and issues, but he doesn't respond to the question that keeps getting asked: How much, in numbers, is a "fair wage" for these workers?
Quit avoiding the question. Otherwise we are going to assume the only thing you've invented is the crowdsourced sweatshop (look, exploitative corporations! all the benefits of a sweatshop without having to rent or maintain a space!).
Where does this lead (Score:2)
So is the future of this digging gold or writing term papers for athletic scholars?
I'd think most useful would be to hire PhDs or maybe sysadmins who are very well studied but live in places where a little money goes a long way in terms of standard of living.
You could even extrapolate this to allow someone in a cosmopolitan area to hire a colleague who has moved into the boondocks. No API for that yet though.. and APIs make people interchangeable which is a problem. Dooms this system to low grade jobs and l
Fair Wage (Score:2)
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Crap.
Same as other crowdsourcing.
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Somebody seems to have misappropriated Governor Perry's speech-writing application.
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