Google hired microworkers to train its controversial Project Maven AI

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4/18211155/google-microworkers-maven-ai-train-pentagon-pay-salary

by anastalaz • 7 years ago

53 38 7 years ago

furyg3• 7 years ago

he workers were hired through a crowdsourcing gig company outfit called Figure Eight, which pays as little at $1 an hour for people to perform short, seemingly mindless tasks.

Wow. Shouldn't there be a 'minimum gig fee' for this type of work? I mean many tasks may take a few seconds for a few cents, but if you work a solid hour and only earn $1 gross income, that seems extremely exploitative (even if the recipients are in Burundi).

c0achmcguirk• 7 years ago

I've picked up a few gigs on Mechanical Turk. You pick up the tasks that are worth your time (that you are qualified for). If you don't like the microtask for the price offered move onto the next one.

If the entity offering the microtasks (gig) don't see enough interest in their tasks, they can raise the bid.

I think that's extremely fair. Let the market dictate the price per task. How do you know what the right price should be?

ineedasername• 7 years ago

on right price: I think a livable wage is reasonable. Though market forces should generally push unskilled labor wages high enough to be livable (though no more than the bare minimum)

But for this type of task, that might be performed in poorest parts of the world, $1/hour may be a livable wage for very unskilled labor. So I'm willing to withhold judgement on that.

demarq• 7 years ago

Is the market really dictating anything at that price or is it desperate.

I don't think anyone with the power to dictate would accept a dollar an hour.

The right word for this is exploitation. Google and Figure Eight directly contributing to income inequality.

Radim• 7 years ago

On what grounds should an unrelated party (furyg3) force their will on two voluntarily trading parties, blocking their (presumably mutually beneficial, since voluntary) transaction?

That's a strangely oppressive, i-know-best-what's-good-for-you position.

rfw• 7 years ago

On what grounds should an unrelated party (the government, via labor law) force their will on two voluntarily trading parties, blocking their transaction?

Because wage slavery exists and you can't shrug your shoulders and say "well, they're choosing to work for peanuts so it's fine!".

eigenvector• 7 years ago

It remains amazing to me how Google, which has received a huge amount of media coverage for being an awesome place to work, can simultaneously draw a line in the sand and say "people who do certain tasks aren't Googlers, and will be treated with the minimum amount of consideration required by law".

I've seen it rationalized all kinds of ways like "engineers are high value and hard to recruit, so they need big salaries and perks, but an HVAC technician at a datacentre doesn't" but it all falls apart when you consider that nearly all white collar professionals at Google get generous salaries, benefits and bonuses, even those in saturated fields like law, marketing or HR and a trade worker at a datacentre actually is directly working on Google's business.

geodel• 7 years ago

Well if people can keep justifying working for companies acting in unethical fashion. Why wouldn't companies think it is fine to bullshit their way out of phony outrage generated by media/social media.

rjf72• 7 years ago

This is the whole point of globalization. Companies go and pay next to nothing for labor that would cost vastly more in developed nations. Ideally it gradually helps build up an economic system in the targeted nations at which point they move onto the next country where they can pay as little as possible and so on, again ideally gradually developing the entire world as you skip from nation to nation.

As a 'closer to home' example, IBM now has more employees in India than anywhere else. Here [1] are the Glassdoor figures for IBM India. The average compensation for a "software engineer" is $8390 per year - about $23 per day. If we assume an 8 hour work day that's less than $3/hour. Bump that up a bit because of time off/holidays and the average real compensation is going to be around $3.50 an hour. And that's for a software engineer at IBM in India, which is a 'less undeveloped' nation than many others. $1/hour for mindless tasks is already not looking so bad.

I'm not a fan of globalization, but for different reasons. It may be arguably exploitative of less developed areas, but it also has a negative affect on more developed nations as well. IBM can hire a dozen software engineers in India for the price of one graduate in e.g. America. There's a reason they're shifting their labor to India. This is completely fine, yet then they turn around and continue to rely on the US as the primary market for their products. E.g. in the case of Figure Eight they source their labor from the poorest places on this Earth and then turn around and sell the 'product' to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, American Express, etc. [2]

---

To clarify one thing, I do not think engaging in these practices is morally wrong. My objection is of a social/economic nature. I think these practices are a net negative on the countries where these companies' sell their product while sidestepping their labor standards and wages in creation of that product. In other words this is a practice I would engage in as an individual concerned for myself, but simultaneously lobby the government to work to curtail as an individual concerned for my nation.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/IBM-India-Salaries-EI_IE354...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_Eight_Inc.

bearmcbearsly• 7 years ago

if you work a solid hour and only earn $1 gross income, that seems extremely exploitative

If that $1 per hour provides you with a better income than your peers with less physical labor, then this doesn't sound exploitive at all.

tomcooks• 7 years ago

(Especially if you sub-hire other people for 0.60$/hour, pocketing 0.40$/hour from each of them for ZERO effort.

fenwick67• 7 years ago

They need better terminology. "microworkers" sounds bad, like they're under-payed (they are).

Try "organic AI" or "incentivized crowdsourcing".

yellow_postit• 7 years ago

mTurk, Crowd Flower, Spare 5, etc. are all popular platforms for gathering labeled training data. It’s a race to the bottom for lowest price per label while maintaining reasonably consistent quality.

dawhizkid• 7 years ago

It's worrisome to me that a U.S. company helping the U.S. military is viewed as so controversial that it would cease to finish that work. I'm glad Amazon and Microsoft, among big tech cos, haven't caved in like Google has.

And yet Google has the gall to spend $5m on a Super Bowl ad touting how it helps veterans. Ridiculous.

ocdtrekkie2• 7 years ago

I see a huge difference between "not helping the military" and "not helping create autonomous weapons". And our drone program is hardly military, it's a mostly CIA-led project to assassinate people without due process in areas we are not at war.

dlp2112• 7 years ago

You have no idea what you are talking about. The vast majority of drone use is for military surveillance that have no strike capabilities, and are used to determine whether to put soldiers on the ground. Good drone surveillance is literally the best resource we have for preventing bad military outcomes. It saves lives, both American and other.

tanilama• 7 years ago

Agree. But Google puts such moral handcuffs on itself, hardly worthy of any sympathy.

all_blue_chucks2• 7 years ago

This is standard practice in AI training. There are countless workers in Asia (typically) who are perfectly willing to help train your algo for less pay than Western workers, and the location where the work is performed doesn't matter at all.

What would be news is if Google were paying $11/hr + social security, etc. just to have people tell an algo which pictures have a dog in them. That would put them at a competitive disadvantage.

kartan4• 7 years ago

What would be news is if Google were paying $11/hr + social security, etc. just to have people tell an algo which pictures have a dog in them. That would put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Yes. Sometimes maximizing profits and having a functional society where everyone has a meal and home is incompatible. I would prefer to see that the long term viability of countries is put higher up than the short term profits of companies. And that is why it is so important to set all countries to the same standards of living (on the high-end preferably).

all_blue_chucks2• 7 years ago

Unless you regularly pay extra when you buy things it's silly to expect Alphabet to do so.

int_19h• 7 years ago

The companies are not going to do that sort of thing out of kindness. It's up to society to set up the appropriate tax regime.

samcday• 7 years ago

Because the only thing better than building an AI to help identify people to kill with impunity, is building an AI to help identify peopl to kill with impunity using slave labor.

zavi• 7 years ago

That's how you label your data. Nothing newsworthy here.

YaxelPerez• 7 years ago

https://joeyh.name/blog/pics/recaptcha.png

Google hired microworkers to train its controversial Project Maven AI

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