15 ms·

Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labe

by hooande 13y ago

Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and formulae, but in most cases the key issue is having enough data. It doesn't matter how fancy your technology is if you don't have lots and lots of clearly labelled samples. Mechanical Turk (and crowdflower and a few other services) are important bridges for this. People can do important labeling and cleaning work for a cost that's affordable enough to be practical. Right now most of the work is translation, address finding or quasi spammy tasks. But the service itself has a lot of potential to do things that impact our lives in the future. Mechanical Turk workers can improve startups by helping with personalization and automation tasks, help with science and defense by labeling images and aid in all kinds of language processing and computer vision tasks that could make things cheaper and better for all of us. It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage. Though I'm not sure that things like this are what the minimum wage was designed for. Completing online labeling tasks is a far cry from working in an actual sweat shop. It would be nice if there was some sort of exception for technical piece work. Mechanical Turk isn't nearly popular enough right now, but in the future as machine learning becomes more common there will be a serious demand for these tasks. I hope we can find a way to let people do data preparation work while avoiding virtual dickensian conditions of a kind of data processing industrial revolution.

flyinRyan 13y ago
> For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage What is the incentive to do an online job and set your prices at the lowest possible legal limit? Surely nearly anything else you could do with a computer would be more valuable? I mean, if you get good enough playing computer games you can make more than minimum wage.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  It's the difference between a guaranteed payout right now vs a possible payout down the road. In order to get paid for online games you probably have to practice for quite a few hours for free before you might get good enough to be compensated.
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    True, but at least you might enjoy it.
    - speeder 13y ago
      Not much... I am a avid gamer, but I gave up forever in going pro, because practice to reach pro level is tiring, VERY tiring... One pro player lived unoficially with me (actually, he lived somewhere else but hated his roomates, so he hanged around my house instead), he would arrive from university, sit on the computer, and play until 4 in the morning, eat delivery McDonald every day, drop on the floor (yes, the floor, not a bed, or a cushion, or anything like this), sleep, wake up at 7 and go to university (without taking a bath...) Sometimes he would get too smelly or clearly lacked decent food, then I and other roomates would kick him out back to his house, and let him return about 3 days later. He is a player I still don't enjoy playing against (Because he wipe the floor with me), but even with all that amount of ridiculous practice, and winning championships, he still do not got sponsors... Now he went to do something else, and play for fun only (and his performance decreased accordingly actually... during his pro years, I would lose 100% of the matches against him, now I only lose about 70% of them, and I am sure I don't improved, since I did not play for 2 years in a row and since my return I had in total about 30 matches, while a pro player could pull 20 practice matches in a day)
      - nnoitra 13y ago
        How many hours do you have to practice a day to be a pro?
- mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
overgryphon 13y ago
If this type of work is important, then why does it not provide minimum wage? For what reason should Mechanical Turk be an exception?
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Legally speaking, the workers are paid as contractors rather than employees. They set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept work they don't want to do. As such, they don't have to pay payroll taxes and are not subject to laws such as minimum wage.
  - pyoung 13y ago
    I am pretty sure contractors have to pay payroll taxes. It is one of the reasons that companies are increasingly classifying employees as contractors, the burden of the payroll tax falls on the contractor entirely (normally it is split 50/50 between employee/employer).
    - philwelch 13y ago
      That doesn't make much sense--payroll tax is roughly 15% either way, so with employees you just pay them 7.5% less than a contractor for the same benefit. The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk. There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.
      - g4m8i7 13y ago
        Or you pay them the same, and skip out on benefits as well as payroll taxes and your ROI is much higher.
    - nazgulnarsil 13y ago
joe_the_user 13y ago
It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. It is, in fact, especially convenient for those who buy this human capital to get it on the cheap. I notice also that you're arguing that this project will allow machine learning to essentially capture this capital and get even more value out of it. Obviously those now selling their skill and knowledge for cheap will not get a cut of that result.
teeja 13y ago
It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. Chillingly spoken like a true, cold-blooded functionary. Are humans mere "capital"? Is their worth decided by being "utilized"? Is that what the meaning of our existence is reduced to? Perhaps our robotic overlords will agree that such a determination fits each and all of us. Tarpaper shacks, dirty water, food scraps and, every now and then, a glance at the Sun when the heat and clouds of pollution part for a short moment. Either that or our future could be much less deterministic and free-form through the elimination of such de-liberate prognoses. One way or another that viewpoint of humanity is doomed to extinction. I'll keep my fork packed, friend.

by hooande 13y ago

flyinRyan 13y ago

> For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage What is the incentive to do an online job and set your prices at the lowest possible legal limit? Surely nearly anything else you could do with a computer would be more valuable? I mean, if you get good enough playing computer games you can make more than minimum wage.

jiggy2011 13y ago
It's the difference between a guaranteed payout right now vs a possible payout down the road. In order to get paid for online games you probably have to practice for quite a few hours for free before you might get good enough to be compensated.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  True, but at least you might enjoy it.
  - speeder 13y ago
    Not much... I am a avid gamer, but I gave up forever in going pro, because practice to reach pro level is tiring, VERY tiring... One pro player lived unoficially with me (actually, he lived somewhere else but hated his roomates, so he hanged around my house instead), he would arrive from university, sit on the computer, and play until 4 in the morning, eat delivery McDonald every day, drop on the floor (yes, the floor, not a bed, or a cushion, or anything like this), sleep, wake up at 7 and go to university (without taking a bath...) Sometimes he would get too smelly or clearly lacked decent food, then I and other roomates would kick him out back to his house, and let him return about 3 days later. He is a player I still don't enjoy playing against (Because he wipe the floor with me), but even with all that amount of ridiculous practice, and winning championships, he still do not got sponsors... Now he went to do something else, and play for fun only (and his performance decreased accordingly actually... during his pro years, I would lose 100% of the matches against him, now I only lose about 70% of them, and I am sure I don't improved, since I did not play for 2 years in a row and since my return I had in total about 30 matches, while a pro player could pull 20 practice matches in a day)
    - nnoitra 13y ago
      How many hours do you have to practice a day to be a pro?
mrgoldenbrown 13y ago

overgryphon 13y ago

If this type of work is important, then why does it not provide minimum wage? For what reason should Mechanical Turk be an exception?

enraged_camel 13y ago
Legally speaking, the workers are paid as contractors rather than employees. They set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept work they don't want to do. As such, they don't have to pay payroll taxes and are not subject to laws such as minimum wage.
- pyoung 13y ago
  I am pretty sure contractors have to pay payroll taxes. It is one of the reasons that companies are increasingly classifying employees as contractors, the burden of the payroll tax falls on the contractor entirely (normally it is split 50/50 between employee/employer).
  - philwelch 13y ago
    That doesn't make much sense--payroll tax is roughly 15% either way, so with employees you just pay them 7.5% less than a contractor for the same benefit. The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk. There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.
    - g4m8i7 13y ago
      Or you pay them the same, and skip out on benefits as well as payroll taxes and your ROI is much higher.
  - nazgulnarsil 13y ago

joe_the_user 13y ago

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. It is, in fact, especially convenient for those who buy this human capital to get it on the cheap. I notice also that you're arguing that this project will allow machine learning to essentially capture this capital and get even more value out of it. Obviously those now selling their skill and knowledge for cheap will not get a cut of that result.

teeja 13y ago

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. Chillingly spoken like a true, cold-blooded functionary. Are humans mere "capital"? Is their worth decided by being "utilized"? Is that what the meaning of our existence is reduced to? Perhaps our robotic overlords will agree that such a determination fits each and all of us. Tarpaper shacks, dirty water, food scraps and, every now and then, a glance at the Sun when the heat and clouds of pollution part for a short moment. Either that or our future could be much less deterministic and free-form through the elimination of such de-liberate prognoses. One way or another that viewpoint of humanity is doomed to extinction. I'll keep my fork packed, friend.