Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

http://chrismaury.com/post/18320761977/mechanical-turk-stations-for-the-urban-poor

by chrmaury • 14 years ago

137 155 14 years ago

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

This would be a great kickstarter project. You may want to modify it though so the station just prints a check or some other instrument other than cash or you will end up with a lot of broken Mechanical Turk Stations.

chrmaury2• 14 years ago

Yea, broken machines or people getting mugged right after cashing out are both concerns. But the people who would benefit most from something like this would be least likely to have a bank account.

dpres• 14 years ago

Tons of businesses cash checks without a bank account. Another concern is kiosk hacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY

shingen4• 14 years ago

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage.

Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread.

Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage.

It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility.

One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

People already work for less than minimum wage... if they can find a job! This would just bring more employment opportunities to those who need it.

marshallp7• 14 years ago

So what you also need is more businesses to use mechanical turk or similar services. There's a huge opportunity in that for startups. The biggest is probably bridging the physical and digital worlds. Controlling robots through mechanical turk. Every factory robot, cnc machine, or 3d printer needs someone to keep an eye on it in case anything goes wrong so that the machine can get shut off.

Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person.

And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.

spindritf2• 14 years ago

> Controlling robots through mechanical turk.

No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine.

> And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.

Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

First of all, the payment is about seven dollar according to the article that is slightly above minimum wage. It may be below some states wage but it is clearly close.

What mechanical turk does allow companies (and individuals) to do however is to hire people for a very short term (a few seconds) for, literally, pennies.

And assuming that enough work was available we should expect the rate to increase since there will be less spam bots.

And at any rate it is better than the alternative of make work.

shingen4• 14 years ago

Federal minimum wage is $7.25 / hour. So it's slightly below minimum wage.

greyish_water• 14 years ago

the payment is about seven dollar according to the article

This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.

danielharan• 14 years ago

I'm glad someone else is calling this for what it is: a way to get around minimum wage.

Another solution would be to use worker reputation (something explored by Panos Ipeirotis @ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ )

Because MT workers are unreliable, you often need to have several doing the same task. Better workers require fewer checks, and are therefore much more cost effective. Right now MT is a market for lemons.

So the challenge then would be to let poor people build up a reputation to fix that market...

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

At that point just hire someone skilled to write around it. The unskilled labour isn't competitive at 7.25/hr. I'd rather send it to a semi-skilled in Bangalore at 5-6/hr.

bmj• 14 years ago

This is not the sort of disruption we want in the marketplace. Let's say someone rolls this out, with moderate success. What's to say a company like Wal-Mart wouldn't crowdsource stocking shelves? We already see some people taking advantage of low-income workers (giving less than 36 hours to avoid health insurance coverage, etc). This would be another opportunity to lower costs all around without much of an upside for those doing the work.

marshallp7• 14 years ago

That sounds like a pretty good idea, walmart crowdsourcing shelf stacking. Startups might be able to offfer that as service smaller stores right now.

Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots.

Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced burger flippers and crowdsourced cleaners.

There's a lot of opportunity in automation of service businesses such as retailer and restaurants, but it seems like the industry does not take much interest in applying robotics to the task. This crowdsourcing system would be a way for nimbler companies to introduce more technology into the system without going through the management.

chrmaury2• 14 years ago

There is a really good talk by Jonathan Zittrain on the dangers of crowd sourcing. I think it speaks to your point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo

hooande• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that "by the piece work" was currently not subject to the minimum wage. For example, if you pay someone $1 per apple that they pick, you aren't required to pay them a minimum amount per hour. Is there anyone familiar with labor law who can provide some perspective?

Natsu• 14 years ago

That's a good question. The law is pretty complex and I don't pretend to understand it all, but the basic answer as I understand it is that piece work rates have to be calculated in such a way that you'll get the "prevailing wage rate" -- http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm

There are also exceptions for people with disabilities, special minimum wages (you can actually pay the disabled less than minimum... sometimes), etc.

So, I think the basic answer is that you still have to respect minimum wage, but how you do that is pretty complex.

gojomo5• 14 years ago

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements.

Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum.

In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive enough to justify a higher wage. An employer will pick a mix other adaptations rather than simply 'the same number of employees at a higher cost' once the wage floor is enforced. (These might include shorter opening hours, more automation, a few higher-paid workers replacing many lower-paid workers, longer waiting lines, less customer service, less attention to cleaning/inventory, and outsourcing work to other lower-cost entities or countries.)

These dynamic adaptations leave a few people bumped up to the higher minimum, but more left completely unemployed, idle and dependent on other social assistance. They're not building work habits or a work history that would put them on the path to much higher wages.

Even if we wanted, as a society, to ensure a certain minimum wage, why would we make the responsibility for paying it fall solely on those particular companies and industries that can best utilize inexperienced and low-skilled labor? Their manufacturing and simple services fill a important role, in the goods they provide and the meaningful productive work they offer those without other skills. By making them and them alone face this costly extra non-market constraint on hiring, they become disadvantaged and shrink, relative to other sectors and overseas competitors.

It would be like deciding "every low-income family requires a computer", but rather than buying it out of common public funds, making it a legal requirement for just the domestic computer industry to provide free computers, out of their own revenues. Would that properly value the exact thing you want to happen – more computer production – or impair it by making it less profitable than other uses of the same talent/capital? The same goes with employment opportunities for the low-skilled. The minimum wage has been thinning such domestic opportunities out, for decades, rather than expanding them. Intended to reduce income disparities, it's increasing them.

blahedo• 14 years ago

> Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare

Cite, please.

gregholmberg5• 14 years ago

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements.

This is in fact their purpose. Minimum wage laws destroy low-paying jobs by making them illegal, preventing the least competitive members of our society from having the hours and days of their lives "mined" by an employer for negligible compensation.

That having these laws "reduces welfare" is, I believe, a conclusion not supported by fact.

A living example can be found in urban Brazil. By failing to outlaw and enforce certain minima (building codes, wages), large Brazilian cities have created vast marginal neighborhoods that no one wants to live in.

Based just on the example of favelas alone, I would argue that having laws to guarantee minimum wages is one thing a government can do immediately to protect the weaker members of a society.

I think you have not addressed another important duty of governments: to provide a reasonably rigorous educational launchpad so that the less fortunate need not always remain so.

imcqueen• 14 years ago

without minimum wage wouldn't simple Supply and Demand take over and cause wages to plummet for unskilled workers? Compare it to software engineering, lots of demand and not enough qualified people = well compensated software engineers

without the minimum you are correct that theoretically more jobs would exist, but at a pay rate so low that it would create an incentive not to work at all. the government assistance required for an employeed unskilled worker and an unemployed one would be about the same, whats the motivation to work?

hippich• 14 years ago

Want to enforce minimum wages laws? No problems - it will just change work flow to workers from other countries where local ones will be left without one extra option.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

That is actually brilliant! I was thinking about something similar, how maybe a poor country could create jobs for its citizens online (and they'd be happy with much less than $7/hour). But this is actually a great idea for poor people in any country...

DanBC• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that there isn't better translation to "minority" languages.

hugh4life• 14 years ago

"found that you can make about $7/ hour."

As someone who turks occasionally, you can't consistently make $7 an hour unless you have some skill that you could probably use on the job marketplace. $3-$4 is more like it.

Dove• 14 years ago

I can confirm that. The article he cites to support the claim (from 2009) indicates the author made $4 off a 350-500 word article, and $3 for a product review. Based on my experience, those went for about $1.50 and $0.50 as of about a year ago.

$3/hr on Turk is pretty good, and you need some education and diligence to do it.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

What if the person doing the Turking was submitting crap data? It seems like you'd have to wait at least a couple days in order for the data to be validated.

marshallp7• 14 years ago

Other platforms built on turk, such as crowdflower, have systems in place to assess accuracy. Another turk worker checks the quality of the work, or 3 workers do a task, and the best, as judged by a different set of workers, is given a bonus.

sturadnidge• 14 years ago

Be good if Amazon themselves got behind something like this, by providing the banking and payment infrastructure. They already issue credit cards, they could instead issue debit cards and directly pay into those. Would eliminate the need for a cash machine on the terminal, although the absurd ATM fees in the US might make it less viable I guess. I assume there are no charges for using debit cards for small transactions in the US (I live in the UK)?

ajays6• 14 years ago

This is a great idea. It would really work if it supplements the welfare checks; it would get people into the mindset of working. Let me explain.

Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream.

A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work?

On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare.

Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.

shingen4• 14 years ago

$20 / hour is a nice thought, but unfortunately what that would do is create massive unemployment and much larger welfare abuse. There's a fine line on just how high you can set a minimum wage (in relation to the economy in question) before you give too much incentive to companies to automate that labor, shrink their business slightly, or offload the costs to the consumer with price increases (net negative result).

Google what happened in New Jersey when they raised minimum wage above the federal level years ago (low paid jobs got wiped out, companies fired workers and attempted to become more efficient, particularly it hammered fast food workers).

Or this:

"Dr. Peter Brandon of the Institute for Research on Poverty studied how raising the minimum wage affect the transition from welfare to work. He found that raising it keeps welfare mothers on welfare longer. Mothers on welfare in states that raised their minimum wage remained on welfare 44 percent longer than mothers on welfare in states where it was not raised"

http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/again...

ajays6• 14 years ago

I understand what you're saying; but the problem here is that 1 state raised the minimum wage. Naturally, jobs will flow to the neighboring states. But what if the Federal minimum wage was raised?

You do understand the point I'm trying to make: that there should be _some_ _significant_ economic incentive for people to get off welfare and on to work! Right now the incentive is minimal at best.

So how do you create the gradient that moves people off of welfare and on to jobs? You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working.

marshallp7• 14 years ago

There are counter-arguments to be made.

1. should people be made to flip burgers or stand in cashier booths when society doesn't really need that. You can order off amazon for example, or eat healthier food that you make at home. Those burgers flippers could then instead be training to become engineers. It might take them longer than an academically gifted person, but they'd get womewhere if they didn't need to flip burgers everyday.

2. If you increase the price of labor by increasing the minimum wage, more opportunities for automation come into play. If burger's flippers were too expensive, restaurant chains might install robots that did it instead. Over time, burger slipping would be even cheaper than the previous minimum wage burger flipper.

rmc3• 14 years ago

scamming the government ("disability", etc.)

You know that there are loads of actual poor disabled people? Not everyone on social welfare is a leech on society. Have some compassion.

waqf• 14 years ago

GP didn't assert there weren't poor disabled people; merely that if you are a [sc. non-disabled] poor person it is possible to scam the government into paying you disability benefits.

anamax2• 14 years ago

> On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare.

How about work as the incentive?

We have crappy parks and yet we give money to folks who don't work. That shouldn't be.

And don't give me "they can't afford day care". For every group of four parents on aid, one does day care for the other three while they work.

Crappy jobs are the best incentive.

ajays6• 14 years ago

> How about work as the incentive?

Here's how I look at it. You can either apply force (by making the urban poor work at some crappy job) ; or you can apply attraction, and have them move themselves (by offering a significant economic incentive to work). Ye old carrot and stick solution. :)

I believe the former (stick) has been tried many times, and it doesn't work quite as well. People just don't like others telling them what to do.

But by giving a significant incentive (a carrot), you make the person themselves affect change; and it is more sustainable.

Anyways: these are just ideas that I'm hoping can spur some discussion. Looking at the number of urban poor, the current system isn't working.

krschultz3• 14 years ago

You do realize that $20/hr over the course of a year is roughly $40,000. And $40,000 is more than what something like 40% of the people in the US make in a given year. That would be an unworkable change in the labor market. Most college graduates don't start out making that much right out of college, much less people without a college degree.

wavephorm• 14 years ago

This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...

orbitingpluto• 14 years ago

Henry Ford also thought it was important that his workers be able to purchase the product that they are making in order to drive the economy. Turking isn't even going to feed you.

underwater• 14 years ago

The point of Mechanical Turk is to decouple the workers from the task being done. As computing advances there should always be some kind of task that requires human effort.

yummyfajitas12• 14 years ago

This is a non-starter for several reasons, mostly relating to spam.

First, you can't just give people cash. They will immediately turn to spamming, and you'll get crap data. You need to do statistics, comparing turks to other turks, and only pay the ones who don't spam. It's highly likely you can't do this in realtime.

Second, you need to track the identity of your turks. If worker X is known not to be a spammer, then you want to assign work to X preferentially. Similarly, if worker Y is a known spammer, you want to refuse him work.

Third, most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?

wilfra2• 14 years ago

It is not a non-starter for those reasons, it may just require some modification if they become problems or if it is deemed they are obstacles too big to even try to overcome.

When getting instant, reliable cash is the result, people will jump through an enormous number of hoops - and even pay money themselves the for opportunity.

For instance, you could require users to create an account on mturk and/or w/ the mturk shop so they can be tracked. If it is simple to do and prompted it should be fast an easy. If they can't even figure this out, they probably aren't qualified to be doing the work anyway.

notatoad• 14 years ago

"most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?"

just because somebody is not looking for a structured job, doesn't mean they won't do tasks for money. think about the homeless guy who wanders around with his shopping cart collecting discarded cans all day. the only social issue i see with a turk kiosk is that it would essentially be a "do things in exchange for drugs" terminal.

Hominem2• 14 years ago

I will do him one better. How about he opens a storefront with locked down machines that do nothing but mechanical Turk and rents them out for 1 an hour. Maybe wow gold farming .

Anyone have an concerns about the ethics of this? On one had 6 net is better than 0, on the other hand it is fairly predatory.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Why lock them down? Why not just rent computers for $1/hr, like at a cyber cafe? That is a solved problem.

Hominem2• 14 years ago

I was thinking in terms of the hair salon model. Chairs are paid for by the stylists but they can only do hair, not give tattoos or just use thier chair to sit back and drink beer.

rmc3• 14 years ago

For all the success that micro-lending has had in India and other countries, we haven’t really seen those benefits in American Urban areas.

I thought the USA had "micro-lending", but they were called "payday loans"?

zdw• 14 years ago

Payday lenders have a significantly higher interest rate - on the order of 500-2000% of the principle per year. The purpose of it is to put the screws on people who aren't able to get loans elsewhere.

Micro lending has more of a humanitarian goal - most organizations tend to lend at reasonable rates (3-15%/year).

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Those organizations lend to local "bankers" who lend out at higher rates to customers.

Payday shops charge reasonable fees per loan, the same fees that all vendors and governments charge for you hanging on to money they want from you. The problem is that payday loan customers get trapped into taking excessive numbers of loans, multiplying fees.

rmc3• 14 years ago

The 3%→15% is what you, the investor (source of capital) get. Micro lending gives that to local lenders who charge high rates.

john_horton• 14 years ago

It's been done (though instead of money, candy and instead of the urban poor, UC Berkeley CS students):

http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-...

pron12• 14 years ago

OMG! You guys! Aside from a few, most comments here are discussing how to actually do this efficiently. I think this might be forgivable as I assume many of you are quite young, but are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work?

Again, I'd like to attribute the responses to the commenters' young age, and I trust your good intentions, but hackers, engineers and all entrepreneurs should really learn something about work-relations, social policy and ethics.

wilfra2• 14 years ago

Pretty sure every libertarian (I am not one), regardless of age, would disagree with you.

If people are willing to do the work for a given wage, the free market should be able to pay them (or so Libertarians believe).

pron12• 14 years ago

There's a market for everything: human organs; hit-jobs. But you know what, I'm not even arguing the merits of the free market. I'm simply amazed at the fact that most comments here simply discuss the efficiency of the process, as if this were an algorithm or a development methodology, rather than something involving real living people, and not any people, but the weakest in society.

I'd like to suggest that instead of building work booths for the poor where machines will pay them money, perhaps the big companies should do everything in their power to make sure these people have a chance at a proper education, so that some day they could have jobs that would give them some dignity. Jobs that the mechanical-turk mega-farmers would wish for their children.

stroboskop• 14 years ago

You are being downvoted because most people on Hacker News disagree with you. Also, because your tone may be perceived as slightly hysterical.

I doubt young age of commenters is the reason for their stance and for many intentions are as good as they pay. Crucially, most people here imagine themselves as (future) bosses and do not empathize with the poor operating mechanical turks. Also consider that many here unconsciously are mechanical turk operators while believing they are entrepreneurs.

There are of course others here as well. But look at the brightness of your comment and you will find out who is the majority.

pron12• 14 years ago

I hope you are wrong about this. And my tone is more than slightly hysterical - I am downright panicking. If Ayn-Randian ideology has taken over the hearts of young Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs, and if that is the current way of thinking in Northern California of all places, then we've got a problem.

But I think you're wrong. I think what we're reading here is not a heartfelt, confident business or social ideology, but a hacker's frame of mind. A hacker mostly thinks about how to do things well. Sometimes he thinks about what to do. Only rarely does he consider the question of why, in the grand scheme of things. Very few hackers consider the social ramifications of technology, and when they do, it's usually very short-term.

orangecat3• 14 years ago

are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work?

I'll go with "yes". Doing productive work, earning money, and gaining basic computer experience would be much better for everyone involved than panhandling on the street.

In equally loaded terms, why would you deny poor people an opportunity to improve their lives?

pron12• 14 years ago

Because this won't improve their lives one bit. It will turn them into drones working for the rich without dignity or respect. Not every transaction that is marginally beneficial to both sides is movement towards a global optimum. On the contrary, arguments like this, talking about improvement is simple "gradient descent". Instead of throwing the poor an insulting bone, using their desperation to gain beneficial work w/o treating them with dignity (benefits, appreciation), I suggest turning the bright minds of Silicon Valley for some true disruptive thinking.

Think about this: is this suggestion going to provide the poor with true social mobility? Is this something our society can be proud of - poor people working for machines, as machines and getting paid by machines? Or is this another way to maximize profit by forsaking gainful, respectful employment, that can be somehow justified by "well, they'll be slightly better off?"

Why not suggest a mechanism by which tech companies can truly offer the poor a hand that will last for generations and create a better society, one we can be truly proud of, even if it's at the cost of loss of some short-term profit? An investment in society's future, if you like. Surely this is something that will be beneficial for everyone in the long run.

ChrisNorstrom3• 14 years ago

lol, you must be in lala land. There are millions of poeple in the United States of America that live in Third World Country like conditions. Unless you're willing to empty your bank account and help them out, this is way it is. That's how the USA got started, that's how China is getting started, that's how Dubai got started. That's reality. The world is not perfect, a shitty job is better than no job.

pron12• 14 years ago

Sure. Pretty soon I bet we'll hear some suggestions - all backed up by hard data, mind you - to reinstate slavery, only this time around it will be voluntary. After all, slave owners fed and clothed their slaves. It will certainly be an improvement over the way some people are living now, so that's a win-win, right? Then some people will say that slavery is wrong, plain wrong, whether it's voluntary or not, and whether it is beneficial to the slaves or not, only to be rebuffed by those in this forum who'll say there's simply not enough evidence to support the necessity of ethics, and others will say: well, that's just the way of the world.

Until that happens, we have before us the suggestion to build working-booths for the poor, where they can simply walk in and work for us, and get paid directly by a money dispenser so that we won't even have to see them or talk to them. And they won't even have to commute - we'll build those hi-tech sweatshops right in their slums. We won't even know their names, and if one of them gets sick - well, someone else will take his place and we won't even have to know about it because we can't really be bothered by poor people and their problems. They should be thankful that we need cheap labor so much that we're even willing to employ them (as long as they don't have to come into the office) - it's certainly better than whatever they must be doing now; selling drugs, probably - after all, that's what poor people do, right? All we have to think about now is how to prevent them from cheating us and stealing our money.

How come people are so sure they can revolutionize the world with some stupid web or mobile app, sure that they can disrupt the market and unseat market leaders, but when it comes to social issues some of those very same people sound like slaves to power themselves? How come hackers who are supposedly able to "think outside the box" sound like old, bitter, fatalist, soulless conservatives?

newhouseb• 14 years ago

This is very similar to what Samasource (http://samasource.org/) does except in a different demographic of poverty (in third world countries). The general idea is that in many places, such as refugee camps, no one has any money and there really aren't any jobs to act as segues to help people rise up out of poverty, if you build computer clusters in these areas, they can do mechanical turk style work, make a lot more money than they could otherwise and be supervised such that quality can be more controlled than a bunch of random people on the internet. Unfortunately they run on a different proprietary alternative to Mechanical Turk (presumably with some tweaks to fit their model).

URSpider94• 14 years ago

I've been sitting here for 10 minutes or so trying to find the right way to critique not just the article, but also the tone of the discussions here. I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching.

If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided to call "bums"), then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? Would this solve real problems for them on a daily basis? What happens when it's cold and snowy out? How many of them know how to use a computer, or read?

Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office, thinking that she knows what her customers want from her company's web site without ever asking them. Before you start throwing out solutions to urban poverty, you might want to at least talk to one or two of the people whose problems you are trying to solve.

pron12• 14 years ago

Finally, some humanity here. Although I see that you've chosen to disguise it in a way "entrepreneurs" would understand. Market research? Alright :)

As long it makes some people think what it's like to grow up poor. Me, I would suggest learning some history and philosophy before the monumental works of the "Lean Startup methodology".

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

> ... then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change?

In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it's couched in statements like the ones you see here that assume that people have chosen poverty -- but that's the basic sentiment.

> Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office...

Well, this is at least consistent. If you think that people have merely chosen to be poor, then you simply need to persuade them to make a different choice.

If one acknowledges that they don't know much about the lives of poor people, they should do what they would with any other domain where they lack experience -- find a domain expert. IMO, the best way to start would be to find those members of the urban poor demographic who have the intelligence and the motivation, but not the skills, to solve their own problems. Then, you can help them solve those problems.

yummyfajitas12• 14 years ago

In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work.

This is more or less true. Go look up labor force participation rates of the poor - most poor adults don't have a job, and aren't looking for one.

fredsters_s• 14 years ago

> I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching

The OP is advocating the installation of a terminal to see if the 'urban poor' use it. That sounds pretty lean to me.

tpolm• 14 years ago

I believe that captchabot and services alike have already successfully implemented this idea.

ChrisNorstrom3• 14 years ago

I like how everyone's discussing the right and wrong of it, weather it would work or not. A true entreprenuer would ignore all that and just try it anyway. We can talk about this till the world ends but at the end of the day, people much smarter than us have made predictions in all sorts of industries and been outsmarted by 2 guys in a garage who tried something crazy that should not have worked.

I say go for it.

prawn3• 14 years ago

Half-baked adaptations:

Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play.

Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.

tnuc• 14 years ago

Mechanical Turk takes up to 30 days to approve payment for any task, so instant payment is out of the question.

Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated.

Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

These exist in China and India.

dools• 14 years ago

I suggest you find out how much someone makes pan-handling per hour. You may be shocked ...

prawn3• 14 years ago

What about paywithatweet repurposed so you pay for digital goods with some Turking? Categorise 50 images and get your favourite local band's latest MP3. $1.90 to the band, $0.10 to the intermediary as their cut.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Pretty sure people who work for $1/hr don't want to spend it on mp3s.

prawn3• 14 years ago

I'm not talking about the less fortunate here, but adapting the Turk idea to something else half-baked.

I could categorise 50 images in 2-3 minutes. It'd take me 1-2 minutes to get out my wallet, get the right credit card and enter the info if I were to pay manually.

I ran the idea past two employees (neither homeless...) who both seemed to think they'd consider a quick spot of Turking in exchange for a digital good.

deepkut• 14 years ago

This sounds like the type of idea that Thiel would be into. I applaud your creativity and these discussions regarding minimum wage are surprisingly pertinent.

kristianp• 14 years ago

I can see one advantage to this, is that the poor don't have any computer skills, and this may give them basic familiarity with using websites. Although I imagine there would have to be a trainer present at all times to help when they get stuck.

A more beneficial concept for the poor is microlending, helping the poor in third-world countries start their own businesses.

technotony• 14 years ago

This won't work, the wage rates on Mechanical Turk for unskilled, low motivated users are too low. I previously worked for a microfinance bank in the Philippines where we employed staff at a little over the minimum wage there which was $5 per day. While we were getting ready for a new product launch I had some staff we couldn't use yet, and seeing they all had computers and internet connection ran a small experiment on Mechanical Turk. They averaged $5-10 per day in income so I stopped it after a month.

There were several problems: 1. Many of the more valuable task required you to meet certain 'skill' levels which these staff didn't 2. Motivation was a huge problem as spending hours per day clicking on images with people or editing text you don't understand was very dull 3. We had problems with internet bandwidth being too slow to allow running through tasks rapidly

It was a pity this experiment failed as it would have been a great way to scale up and create income opportunities for some very destitute people.

Duff2• 14 years ago

The problem with a "solution" like this is same as the problem that the minium wage presents: it is insufficient to live on, and less than the value of social services benefits.

If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Wall Street tried that, by destroying the real estate market.

Duff2• 14 years ago

Wall St gave people with no money the ability to buy stuff that they cannot afford. I'm talking about a $300/mo apartment.

techiferous• 14 years ago

I suspect panhandlers make more than $7/hour, so for them to stop panhandling and start using a mechanical turk station would be a pay cut.

neworbit• 14 years ago

For better or worse, you're likely to get better results to your work requests by putting these same devices in chosen offshore locations; you're arbitraging median-skill median-lifestyle foreigners in lower cost of living areas versus lower-quartile lifestyle and limited-skill Americans.

Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break.

If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.

Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

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