In the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy lost 9 million jobs: between April and October of that year, the national unemployment rate would rise to 10 percent as the stock market plummeted to nearly half its value.
Money stood at the forefront of collective anxiety: every day seemed to generate new tales of friends getting laid off or of more companies’ having closed up shop. That summer, I discovered people were resorting to making money online using a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, or “MTurk” as it’s colloquially known. MTurk was started in 2005 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and director of Amazon Web services Peter Cohen as a way to solve problems with Amazon’s ever-expanding data set. The premise was that a distributed crowd of humans could easily complete tasks that computers found too challenging. The jobs, called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) on the service, might be to match the name of an item—say a 95-ounce box of Tide detergent—to the correct product image. The typical pay for HITs like this range from $0.01 to $0.20 and often need to be completed within a limited amount of time.With my curiosity piqued, I began surveying workers on MTurk, asking them to tell their stories through short memoirs. What started as research about a tool I might use in my artistic practice became a much deeper experience. The stories I heard were parables of everyday life, success, and struggle. Now, five years later, I came back to them to see if the story of crowdsourced labor has changed.
MTurk drew its name and conceptual model from the 18th- entury invention created by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen, who created a mechanical chess-playing automaton that supposedly “defeated nearly every opponent it faced.” In truth, it was a hoax: A real, human chess master was hiding inside the machine.
To extend this conceit to Amazon’s platform, Bezos coined a clever, glossy euphemism, describing the service as “artificial artificial intelligence.” Looking through the FAQ page for MTurk gives a better sense of what this artificial artificial intelligence might entail:
When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?At first, MTurk seemed appealing as a tool that could complete work like any other software with the unique exception of being powered by an unnamed, globally distributed group of people. I envisioned doing a kind of conceptual exploration of this virtual workspace, which could then lead to future collaborative projects with the platform. But soon, I found myself preoccupied by a truly basic question: Who were the people fulfilling these requests? Who were the chess players within the machine?
My hunch was that the workers using MTurk were middle-class skilled workers like myself. To test this hypothesis, I used MTurk to hire some of them to tell me why they were on it. Since MTurk tasks needed to take only minutes to complete, I requested a brief, 250-word account and let them know that I would share their story on a Tumblr, which I titled The Mechanical Turk Diaries. I decided to pay $0.25 per story, which at the time seemed like a high rate relative to other HITs on the platform.
by Jason Huff, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
