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Hackers can solve this problem - cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be

by unono 13y ago

Hackers can solve this problem - cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish. - training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers. - decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts. That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.

jiggy2011 13y ago
Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor. Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.
- unono 13y ago
  The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level. This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done. Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.
    - unono 13y ago
      You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work. So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up. Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for it, at least at higher pay rates. It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.
        unono 13y ago

by unono 13y ago

jiggy2011 13y ago

Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor. Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.

unono 13y ago
The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level. This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done. Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.
  - unono 13y ago
    You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work. So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up. Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for it, at least at higher pay rates. It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.
      - unono 13y ago