Hybrid Assignment 7
In return of the crowds, Aytes compares Amazon’s micropayment based crowdsourcing platform by comparing it to an 18th Century Automaton Chess Player. Crowdsourcing platforms utilize the public to complete business related tasks that it would ordinarily do for itself. Aytes tries to get us to think about how this has replaced traditional forms of employment. While the labor may not always be free, it still costs less than paying a traditional employee, hence the appeal to corporations. She uses the example of an Indian Human Intelligence Task worker (HIT) and how he made only $572 for 10,000 HIT’s despite having a 98.2% approval rate. While many may argue that he could choose not to do the job, they are overlooking the fact that the corporations target poorer countries so that people are more inclined to do the job for a meager compensation. Aytes states “U.S based Turkers oppose exploitation claims and state their interest in Mechanical Turk is solely motivated by the novelty of the experience. This fact could be explained through the seemingly negligible amount of income that can be earned through AMT for a U.S. based worker.” Crowdsourcing therefore has more benefits for U.S. workers than for those outsourced from other countries.
Aytes also touches on the fact that these workers from other countries are sometimes forced to work much more hours than the typical U.S worker. For example, in Germany, German “guest workers” were expected to work 80 hour work weeks in order to supply the labor needs for post war Germany. These guest workers were paid less than domestic workers and were exploited outside of normal legislations, rights and union protections. All this is done to exploit time zone differences so that businesses can have the needs of their company met 24/7.
The connection Aytes is trying to make to the reader is that both systems are similar. In the Chess Player example, the audience is deceived into believing that there is a sophisticated mechanism capable of playing chess against humans, when in fact it is a person controlling the mechanism. In crowdsourcing, we often think we are dealing with an intelligent computerized program, when in fact there is a person working behind the scene to meet our needs. These businesses want us to believe that technology has advanced to a place where infinite amount of things can be done by a computer program, but it is in fact a deception because there is always a human manpower working to make these things happen.
