It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans.

Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

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muzani 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks.

The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem here - factory workers would live in hostels, eat the free factory food or the cheap street food that cropped up near the area. They'd meet and marry other factory workers, have kids, who'd also work there. They were a modern little serfdom. Same goes for plantations.

Things like gig work and mturk were an exit from that. Not always leaving an unhappy or dangerous life, but making their own life.

If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.

	▲	akerl_ 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway. This paragraph is so tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the issue. The fact that a company found someone willing to do a job for what they want to pay does not mean that it's ethical or moral for them to do so. In this case (as in many others), one of the predicates was finding groups of people whose existing options, financial literacy, living conditions, or some combination of the three were already so bad that becoming digital serfs was a minor step up.
	▲	frmersdog 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I got paid $11 an hour to enter handwritten applications into a database, as a temp job back in the early 2010s. It was "low-skill" inasmuch as, "Locking in and moving efficiently through entire filing cabinets of forms, often written by people whose first script was not Latin, for 6-7 hours straight, every weekday, for 2 months, with no prior training," is "low-skill" (and I apparently did it much faster than my supervisors expected). $11/hr was less than it should have paid, and yet I have to commend the company I was working with, because they sourced local labor and paid still multiple times what the job would have commanded through outsourcing via Mturk. The conditions you're describing were caused by the systemic globalist status quo that Mturk is a part of; Mturk did not fix that, it perpetuated it.

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pacoWebConsult 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not a fraction of what it would cost to actually employ those humans, since there were humans who clearly chose to do that work when presented with the opportunity.

I think this is a very first-world oriented take. It efficiently distributed low-value workloads to people who were willing to do it for the pay provided. The market was efficient, and the wages were clearly on par with those who were doing the work found economical to do, considering they did (and still do) the work for the wages provided.

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amelius 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and "use the output of MTurk workers to make themselves redundant."