Title: Cross Currents: Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk
Author: Joel ross
Publisher: CHI 2010: Imagine all the People, April 10-15, 2010
Summary
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service is a crowdsourcing system that distributes task among a population of anonymous thousands of people. The tasks are simple, one-time tasks in which workers are paid to complete, much like a quest or something like that in some role-playing video games. The tasks are usually difficult for computers but easy for humans (image labeling, photo tagging, mp3 transcriptions, paraphrasing articles, etc). These tasks are known as "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs). They typically offer a relatively low compensation ($0.01 cent for quick tasks, upwards of a $1.00 or more for more complex ones).
The largest demographic of workers early on were young, educated women seeking to supplement their current income. 40% of these women made more than $40,000 annually and resided in the U.S. This population [HITs] however, has changed over time. The service became increasingly popular (around the 2 year mark) in the international community, particularly in India. Young Indian men have found this to be a good source of primary income, due to its pervasive and anonymous access.
Because of the anonymity, it is difficult to gauge the true demographic of the workers taking part in "Turking". Surveys are typically offered as HITs so it is possible that the results could be very skewed.
Discussion
This was an interesting article. There are obviously moral implications to work like this. I don't think that MTurk's founders ever really thought so many people would come to depend on these HITs as primary income. With so many people dependent upon it, what happens if they decide they just don't need to host these tasks anymore?
It's hard to argue that the people who rely on these tasks should get paid more, seeing as how this is somewhat of a volunteer job. But it does serve to remind us that in times of desperation, people will do whatever it takes to provide for themselves and their family. It is immoral to take advantage of those people just because you can.
I agree that you can't argue that the people who rely on the Mechanical Turk service should be paid more. However, it would be nice if Amazon would somehow incentiveize HIT employers to pay out slightly more to *all* HIT workers.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the implication that MTurk is taking advantages of its Turkers. I haven't read the article or looked into MTurk, but from what you've written, it seems to be a completely voluntary service driven by market forces. I would even argue that it would be irresponsible to rely on this as a primary source of income. This isn't to say anything about my political or economic beliefs as a whole, either; this is purely my opinion on MTurk itself.
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