Life in a clickshop
January 17th, 2010 | by elisabeth | Published in ubicomp | 7 Comments
In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and the Turkers wouldn’t necessarily have to know what they were doing. In the department of amazingly cool ideas, though, the folks at the Extraordinaries reflected on the Iran example and then turned it around. After the earthquake in Haiti, they posted news wire pictures of people in Haiti (with crowdsourced help), asked others to post pictures of missing relatives, and finally asked volunteers to try to match the two up. This is v 1.0 of what could be a terrific and widely-used technology after natural disasters, allowing people at home to do more than just donate money.
As we keep thinking about ubicomp and the potential upsides and downsides, it’ll be important to keep in mind that it’s a tool—a largely undeveloped one as yet—with much room to develop in both directions. In that spirit, I wanted to comment on this piece from Technology Review that casts a skeptical eye on Prof. Zittrain’s recent column in Newsweek on cloud labor (also known as ubiquitous human computing). The Newsweek editors gave the piece the ominous headline “Work the New Digital Sweatshops,” and Tech Review bloggers question whether that’s really a fair description of the Mechanical Turk platform. I’m not sure there’s a real disagreement here—the Newsweek headline overstated the content of the piece. Much of the point, as I read it, was just that cloudwork practices are so new, dynamic, and varied that it’s hard to know what the good and bad effects will turn out to be. As they point out, this could be a boon for workers here in the US who want flexibility and autonomy, as well as creating new kinds of opportunities for workers abroad. A few specific points are worth thinking about, though.
They quote John Horton, at Harvard, who put out a HIT (“human intelligence task”) on Amazon Mechanical Turk asking about working conditions, and found that a small majority think AMT requestors treat workers better than most real-world employers. That surprised me—maybe I spend too much time reading Turker messageboards, where the theme is often discontent. I wonder, though, whether many responders use AMT for fun or small income supplements, rather than to earn a living wage, which changes the complexion of the situation. Even if Horton is wholly correct, though, it doesn’t mean requestors can’t improve. For a project I’m doing for JZ’s winter cyberlaw class, we’ve put up some AMT HITs asking about worker satisfaction. We’ve found that people do not like doing search engine optimization or creating spam, and a majority (though not an overwhelming one) likes knowing what the project is for. Disclosure of the company’s identity or the project purpose could become a much stronger norm on AMT, which would help fend off the problems of work alienation and unwittingly doing bad things with the platform, but wouldn’t detract from any of the benefits TR bloggers praise.
The other major point they make is that this type of work can be good for workers in developing countries. That’s definitely true in some cases (see, for instance, previous blogging about CrowdFlower’s GiveWork program). I certainly don’t have enough background in international development to make an unambiguous statement either way. But surely it’s worrisome that children can be made to do the work as well as adults—there’s just no way of knowing who’s at the other end of the system. Overall, for better or for worse, we live in a society where we’ve decided that paternalistic labor laws play some valuable role. Some of them can be imported into an AMT context—but maybe not internationally—and the technology means that some can’t, even if, like child labor, there’s widespread condemnation. I would agree, and I think JZ would too, that we don’t want regulators charging in with too heavy a hand. But we should be alert to what’s happening on these platforms.
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer
January 18th, 2010 at 1:04 pm (#)
Thank you for pointing out at this discussion: it’s rare that Tech Review replies to a column, and even rarer that Newsweek is part of such discussion. I’d like to point out one detail, your comment about child labor:
First, the key point that I’ve heard from JZ is about “fun work”: what to do when children would rather play what is a game to them rather then play outside?
secondly, most child labor is physical, in the meatspace, and that platform, if turned to a form of child labor, can actually encourage parents to let they children in front of a computer, most likely the best thing for them. My point isn’t unlike the defense of sweatshops where work conditions are rather OK, thanks to minimal unionisation and a steep improvement over the alas usual prostitution, mining, etc.
I do like being an economist and asking ”is it better?“, in addition to listening to laywers and polsci asking “is it good?”
January 18th, 2010 at 3:07 pm (#)
Regarding: “Much of the point, as I read it, was just that cloudwork practices are so new, dynamic, and varied that it’s hard to know what the good and bad effects will turn out to be.”
Well, we can make a p-r-e-t-t-y good guess at some of them, from a simple acquaintance with labor history. Hmm, whatever could happen from a system that makes workers completely powerless and expendable, with no collective bargaining power whatsoever? Just what could be the possible results? Oh, this is such new and unexplored territory, maybe little elves will love working for Santa at wages of a glass of milk and cookies (they like making toys – it’s fun!) …
No personal offense intended, and I understand there’s many pressures involved in some of the politics of having to be considered intellectually reasonable by fanatical plutocrats. But it does lead to some very strange effects.
January 19th, 2010 at 3:38 am (#)
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January 21st, 2010 at 5:10 am (#)
@Seth,
Even Turkers—the lower level of interaction and unionisation— have forums. In the era of Google, you just need a name.
January 21st, 2010 at 10:01 am (#)
I don’t follow your logic – somehow, forums/Google do not seem to have produced minimum wage laws, health insurance, grievance procedures, job protection – all things that matter for employment.
To expand on my comment #2 above, since I don’t have to be “respectable” at all :-), one of the oddest things about the political constraints is the way that while this is all Labor 101, you’re never, ever, supposed to indicate you know that, because that’s Not Acceptable within the boundaries of permissible discourse. I keep praising JZ for being willing to engage this obvious aspect even a little.
January 26th, 2010 at 7:17 am (#)
[...] * Future of the Internet puts out a HIT about worker satisfaction: http://futureoftheinternet.org/life-in-a-clickshop [...]
January 27th, 2010 at 5:19 am (#)
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