Author: Hope Reese
Publisher: Tech Republic
Publication Year: 2016
Summary: The following article discusses how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online platform that allows people to perform small tasks for pay. This group, as of 2016, was 75% American, 10-15% Indian and mostly women, and do jobs such as data categorization, metadata tagging, data entry, email harvesting or placing ads on videos. Over 50% of “turkers” earned less than the U.S minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The work these people do is essential for supervised learning machine algorithms. In 2013 it was estimated AMT earned $120 million in revenue. One example a worker recounts tagging ISIS beheading videos for 10 cents a video. A psychologist noted that “turkers” were exhibiting similar trauma to first responders. Current systems are a combination of human/machine interaction. Online platforms are leading to decentralization of work but not all jobs are created equal.