Managing Human Workers With an Algorithm 186
New submitter prayag writes "With the advent of crowdsourcing platforms it has become easier for people to 'automate' simple, yet repetitive tasks that computers aren't good at by hiring thousands of people at once. This can help some business cheaply accomplish certain tasks, but it can also be misused by spammers. A company called MobileWorks is even outsourcing this concept, reaching out to workers in developing nations whose income needs aren't as high. 'Kulkarni, who founded the company in 2010 with fellow graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley, says the value of tasks is set so that workers can reasonably earn $2 to $4 an hour; payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries. "Even though they are acting as agents of a computer program, we are creating an opportunity for them," he says. MobileWorks charges its clients rates starting at $5 per hour for workers' time.'"
Client rates... (Score:2)
"clients rates starting at $5 per hour for workers' time."
Well, at least that prices out the sweatshops. Sorry, Nike and your ilk, you'll have to continue using your inefficient stuff.
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Isn't this exploitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno about you, but when I read that I see exploitation all over it
Re:Isn't this exploitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno about you, but when I read that I see exploitation all over it
This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept. The workers provide their own working environment, and the workers can take a break or stop working anytime they want. In many poor countries $3/hr is far above prevailing wages, and can support a standard of living that may surprise you. How is any of this "exploitation?"
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This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept.
You mean out of all their many options ? Wow ... that must be so great.
Meanwhile you forget the other side of the equation : you are forcing others to also accept the lowest rate. You are essentially locking Americans (and Europeans, and South Americans, hell, at these rates, even Middle Easterners and and and ...) out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
There are these people, you may have met them, that do not have degrees, that d
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Exploitation, period. If not, please give a *sound* definition (!= neoliberal) of exploitation.
Re:Isn't this exploitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone once gave me this thought experiment to help illustrate the problem.
Suppose a company on an alien planet decided to outsource production of some product to earth.
Further suppose that on this other planet gold was plentiful, and wages were measured in tons of gold per day.
Would social do-gooders on the alien planet be outraged that wages paid to earthlings were thousandths of what the wages would be on the alien planet?
Should they be outraged?
Further, would it be ethical on the part of the alien corporation to pay the same wages to their earth counterparts as was common on their home planet? ie. If they needed 100 humans to make their product, would it be ethical to make those 100 people the richest (most powerful) people on earth in the name of "equality" in their home society?
Usually when we talk about exploitation we are making an ethical judgement. There certainly has to be a point at which to offer substantially higher wages to a subset of a community becomes damaging to the community. The fact is (as ShanghaiBill points out below), the company offers poor people a chance to make money at a rate that they voluntarily accept. How is that exploitative?
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Thank you for relating that interesting analogy for us
Sure, if the aliens pay the same wages (tons of gold) to the 100 extra-lucky humans, they would become the most richest 0.1% amongst the 7 or so billion inhabitants on this planet
But, in the case we are talking about, paying the same US wage scale to those who work for them, even if they are living in Timbuktu, will make them relatively rich, but not super-rich, surely not the 0.1% most richest amongst all the other "Timbuktuans" (sorry, I don't know the
Re:Isn't this exploitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, compare the two situations, the one with and the one without the tourists. The wages for everybody is the same, but with the tourists, we have transferred a lot of people from productive work to unproductive waiting. This is harmful to the local economy. This effect happens even without the rickshaw drivers becomming the richest people around, it just have to pay markedly more than unskilled work does.
Or in short: If you are external to an economy, don't pay excessively for anything.
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And we can use your analogy better if we suppose that Oxygen kills these aliens.
So suppose while removing the job for the alien and giving it to an earthling for mere ounces of gold per day, they pipe in their atmosphere wherever they set up shops, and start killing off the indigenous life. Did L. Ron Hubbard already make this movie? OK, moving on...
So while ruining our planet, they reduce jobs at home -- and any company competing with them will have to lower wages to ounces of gold or ship that job to eart
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Workers in different areas do different kinds of work, so they earn different wages.
Not according to TFA tho
The workers do similar work, online, but are being paid differently, depending on where they live
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After all, profiting from human misery is what American businesses do best. Rewarding the people who do actual work in line with the value of their work product? SOCIALISM!
Hooray for Globalization (Score:4, Insightful)
payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries
There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
Fear Not! (Score:5, Insightful)
The larger and wealthier they get, the more secure and generous giant international corporations will feel. Their titanic concentrations of wealth will trickle down to . . .
. . . oh, sorry, I can't type this shit with a straight face long enough to come to a decent snark.
This technique is yet another step down a road toward a world where callous corporations dominate all political and economic activity.
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U r bang on except we arrived at the end of the corporate slavery road some time ago.
The feeling that we are not there yet is just a side effect of consuming popular culture/propaganda.
The fact is that even though we may only just be realizing how bad we are being fucked over by our corporate masters, they have been doing it to us for a while.
Leonard Cohen knew it.... The war is over, the good guys have lost, and everybody knows.
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Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
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When did Slashdot become Marxdot?
And seemingly, anything vaguely Marxist sounding immediately gets modded up to +5. Yawn. I want to discuss tech news, but every single topic is becoming "death to Capitalism! Ra ra."
Re:Hooray for Globalization (Score:4, Insightful)
About the same time you got stupid from talk radio.
One thing about the Slashdot audience (aka "nerds") is they can figure out when something works and when it doesn't. Maybe it comes from debugging code or compiling kernels. And experience with the technology sector gives one direct experience with corporate excess and the dangers of concentration of corporate power. We see it every single day.
It makes it a lot easier to recognize that kind of FAIL in the wild.
You don't have to be a genius to know that "free market capitalism" isn't working as advertised, but if you are a genius, you have no doubt that it's broken.
Re:Hooray for Globalization (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to clarify, by "you" I don't mean you personally (although I don't rule it out).
I refer to "you" as being the subset of people who believe it's even close to correct to call any criticism of laissez-faire "Marxism" as if the only possible alternative to the current corporate plantation system is Soviet-style gulags.
One clue for spotting stupid: when someone uses the term "Marxist", the probability of stupid approaches 1. It's the Godwin of economic discussions. (example: "Oh that Obama is nothing but a Marxist" or "Elizabeth Warren is a Marxist because she's trying to take away the banks' God-given right to rip-off customers".) Oh, and if you encounter the term "Muslim" in proximity to the term "Marxist" you have a stone-cold lock of the century of the week that you're dealing with mil-spec stupid.
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"Stupid people reference Marx, therefore any reference to Marx is stupid."? Pity you use logical fallacies continually in your arguments, in every single post .. because it sounds like you're actually just smart enough to be able to recognize a logical fallacy .. and yet you keep using them. Either you're not recognizing that you're doing it, or you don't care because the logical fallacies suit an agenda. It would be nice to have a more meaningful discussion with you about this stuff if you ever decide you
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When it's in regard to anything having to do with the current political/economic system in the developed world, absolutely.
Provably. In every single case.
Well...wait a minute. I just thought of an exception. If it's used in some variation of the statement: "There is nothing "Marxist" about any elected politician in the United States today", or "Anybody who uses the term "Marxist" to describe anything having to do with the current
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It's a hallmark of listeners of "conservative" talk radio to paint themselves as victims, while using the slogan, "We are not victims".
Again, I'm not saying that you are a listener to talk radio, BeanThere (thought I'm not ruling out the possibility).
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Again, your strategy is lying, and using logical fallacies. Sigh. Could you please JUST ONCE use facts and reason, please, please?
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Did that new tinfoil hat come from Target or Walmart?
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I don't claim that it doesn't work, I claim that it doesn't exist and cannot exist. I claim that it's a fantasy abused by the elite to enslave.
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The same arguments were put forward to explain why there were bread lines in the Soviet Union. (This isn't paradise because this isn't real Marxism comrade!)
Odd to see that two sides seemingly opposed use the same excuse to defend their broken system of choice.
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We see it every single day
Even the janitor at Goldman Sachs can see that "something" isn't working right, but it doesn't make him automatically highly qualified to restructure structure with force.
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Sorry: *structure = restructure society
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From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeois and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that "The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are... one and the same"; he believed that they did this by purporting the concept that "the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
Bourgeoisie: those who
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Incidentally, in spite of your "insightful-moderated" ad hominem attempt to poison the well while also using a strawman, I in fact have never listened to one single minute of the talk radio you refer to. I learned about Marx by, you know, READING WHAT MARX ACTUALLY WROTE. If you ever care to try debunk an argument using facts and reason instead of lies, insults and logical fallacies, then let me know.
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Logical fallacies aren't "buzzwords" - they're for identifying broken thinking. They're as unemotional as you can get - they are PURE REASON. (Since you don't know what they are, perhaps you should learn first, as if you knew what they were, you would realize you are actually embarrassing yourself with your comments.)
Each of those labels refers to a particular reasoning and argumentation error used by PopeRatzo (it's common convention in debate to just refer to these by name, they aren't insults and they ce
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Logic is not flawed; only its application is, when people don't use logic, like PopeRatzo, who refuses to use logic in so much as one post.
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Um, no. They actually aren't very good at this at all. To figure out whether something works or not, you first have to understand it - and outside of tech topics Slashdotters aren't much better at that than anyone else. And then, they're also heavily biased... on both tech and non tech topics.
Re:Hooray for Globalization (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Recompiling a kernel and working in a company make you highly qualified in political and moral philosophy.
Yes. I have a low tolerance to Truthiness. If a device is not giving consistent results, it is flawed. If a program is giving inconsistent results, it is buggy. If a person is saying inconsistent things, they are liars. An IT background has forced this world view. Others will be less fault tolerant of people.
2. The current corporatist system we have is flawed. Because corporatism is flawed, some other thing that isn't corporatism is "broken"?
No. There may not be an "Unbroken System". But we should be filtering for flaws and implementing ways of removing flaws as quickly as possible. Something corporate lobbyists seem to be opposed to.
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Others will be more fault tolerant of people.
Fixed that for me. Next time I'll spend more time reading back.
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You are misusing the concept of fault tolerance. It implies the system could continue to work, despite the faults. Some may say our system is working, but it sure as hell is not working for the common man.
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Do you actually know the difference between corporatism and capitalism?
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Most of the hard and uneasy questions of morale and philosophy can be boiled down to simple "how does it work" and "how should it work"
This is what's referred to as a Utilitarian approach to moral philosophy. And it's wrong. It's the idea that moral philosophy should be based on some measurable outputs or statistics. Programmers and engineers in particular tend to make this mistake, perhaps because they want to "engineer society" the way they engineer computer programs or electronics.
Some thought experime
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Please read the post, digest the point. You completely and utterly missed 90% of what I wrote, and just picked up one or two keywords. The hypothetical question is, would it be moral to FORCE EVERYONE to take happy pills, if it could provably make everyone happier. It's a thought experiment, designed to evoke structured logical reasoning about an issue.
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Technology has a profound effect on the way society works and on the way different countries interact.
I'm open to a discussion on why paying Pakistanis less than Romanians for the exact same work makes sense,
but you mostly seem interested in calling that discussion Marxism and claiming I mean "death to Capitalism! Ra ra."
Am I really the only one who thinks that arbitrarily paying people from certain countries less for the same work is a shitty thing to do?
You don't have to be a Socialist to find that idea r
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If you were open to a discussion on why paying Pakistanis less than Romanians for the exact same work doesn't make sense, then you would've said that in your post. YOU DIDN'T. Don't back out now. What you said was, and I quote:
"Hooray for Globalization (Score:3) ...
There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits."
Actually, I change my mind - backing out now is exactly the correct thing to do when you realize you are wrong.
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My company adjusts pay based on cost of living. If I were to move from the sleepy midwest to the bustling west coast I'd see a raise of ~$15,000... and I'd be less able to live comfortably on it and that's just within the continental US. Maybe equal worth for equal pay makes more sense when you're talking about a globalized workforce.
I don't know, but I do know that my wage is some places would have me living like a king, in other places I'd be in a 1 room studio apartment eating ramen.
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That's what happens when people realize the fruits of unbridled capitalism.
death to Capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with capitalism.
There is something wrong with corporations having unbridled power over governments, societies, people and the environment, manipulating them all to maximize the wealth of the executives. The root of the problem is that corporations are essentially amoral sociopaths with indifference to the means and only one objective: maximising the wealth of the executives.
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There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
Well, that is why people go into business.
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payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries
There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
And that is a good reason. If this company is highly profitable, they can afford to grow quickly, hire a lot more people, and lift many more families out of poverty. If instead, they pay more than they have to, that will benefit relatively fewer.
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Of course, all the foreign pesky brown-skinned workers who are actually benefiting in a meaningful way, I suppose they don't count as "people" in your view?
Some more food for thought (between your shrieks of hysteria): Did you know that the global Gini coefficient has been decreasing (improving) for decades, even as absolutely quality of life has also been improving in virtually all countries?
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Sorry, there is always another statistics, for example that there is constantly growing break-up between "the elite" - rich aristocracy of the modern world - and "everybody else"
Uhrm ... do you even know what the fuck the global Gini coefficient is? It's a measure of actual facts showing exactly the opposite of what you claim here. Hello, hello .. knock knock .. anybody home ...
And no, "evolution" does not take place that quickly on such a scale.
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Is your Google broken or something? If you don't know what a Gini coefficient is, or what an 'ad hominem' is (or strawman, etc.), please, just first Google it, read the results, and then come back. I won't go away. I'd rather discuss somebody better informed, than somebody who shoots his mouth off quickly but accidentally proves beyond a doubt that he doesn't even understand what he responded to.
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I know that 'gloom and doom' are popular and easier to believe, but here are some links that you simply must read/watch:
http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distribution-income [voxeu.org]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo [youtube.com]
What is true, is that within the US Gini has been growing dramatically (in layman's English: GLOBALLY income inequality has been GETTING BETTER, but within the US it has been getting worse), and that is largely because of corporatism, and the increasing consolidation of po
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And since your Google is broken, "kleptocratic" basically means, in short, 'rule by thieves'.
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There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
Actually, if you take the time to read about the system, you'll learn that the reason is very simple: different kinds of work are reserved for different kinds of workers, in keeping with the company's comprehensive and World Bank-partnered anti-poverty goals [mobileworks.com]. Tasks that pay less are routed to workers for whom the pay can still make a meaningful impact. For example, OCR tasks that you can do on a cell phone might be sent to an individual working on a cell phone in Mumbai, while tasks requiring Photoshop ex
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I don't think the American way is so much meaningless as it's an illusion propagated by the powerful over the weak, in order to keep them that way. Kind of like the American Dream, where the idea is that if you work hard and live a virtuous life (whatever the fuck that means) you will be successful. Tell that to the janitor that works his ass off, literally running between offices to be able to complete their assigned work (and therefore keep their job) making $8.35 an hour.
Yet another thing that doesn't help the US. (Score:4, Insightful)
Kill this concept with fire and nuke it from orbit, TYVM. The last thing this economy needs is to siphon more work while we have people who cannot find replacement work fast enough to justify this kind of stuff.
The only logic in this algorithm is that US citizens are considered persona non grata unless they want to forgo the 13th Amendment in the name of economics - much like the various programs that precede it. Given the other companies out there, this is an already solved problem for the Third World. What they fail to do is to solve it for the First World.
In addition, the only purpose that this could serve is spam.
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#2. Rich people can take their resources elsewhere
#3. Corporations are people, apparently. Thus the singluar rich have a louder voice that the masses.
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With point 1, that fails to take into account that services like this act as an incorrect redistribution that pulls the US down to pull the world up. The world acts not like a dynamic pie, but a 99.999999999999999999% fixed pie.
Point 2 is effectively nullified by the United States, which doesn't care about jurisdiction. Repeat enough times, and it becomes a futile task to go anywhere when the US is already ahead of you.
Point 3 can be managed with a government that considers it a problem solved by requirin
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With point 1, that fails to take into account that services like this act as an incorrect redistribution that pulls the US down to pull the world up. The world acts not like a dynamic pie, but a 99.999999999999999999% fixed pie.
You might want to read up on the counterintuitive concept of comparative advantage [wikipedia.org]. In short, free trade benefits everybody, as people can specialize in whatever they are comparatively best at. Of course, there are some assumptions which will hold to a smaller of higher degree, depending on the exact case.
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In addition, the only purpose that this could serve is spam.
One word: reCAPTCHA.
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I consider people outside the US to be my brothers and sisters just as much as people inside the US. If it benefits them, it's good.
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Don't know, I thought something completely different when I read this. Having lived in impoverished countries, I thought of people I knew and thought, "what a great opportunity for them to earn extra money!"
Yeah, but that would take all the historical inequities and smear them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would call prosperity and we can't allow that! :)
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As a former Peace Corps volunteer and a business creator in USA, let me tell you and the other Anti-Globalists that you are completely and utterly wrong. About most things, yes, but about this particular thing, you aren't in the tiniest bit correct. The Algorithm outsources computing calculation time from a huge computer, e.g. giving IBM's Big Blue more "leisure time" (if you insist on Marxist/Utopian language). The $4 per hour job doesn't take a single thing away from the USA. It goes to a place with
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In the past, "the next big thing(s)" that would replace the lost jobs were fairly clear. This time it's different. Nobody knows what will replace all the jobs lost to automation and offshoring. I cannot name a potentially big industry that will replace them, can you?
Maybe "it" will finally come in 10 years, but humans don't last that long without food and shelter.
Perhaps work is becoming "obsolete", but the right-wingers will bitch about "commie socialism" if we subs
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I'll stick to paid interns for this kind of work (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're hiring out to a part of the world you'll never visit and never know the people, you are going to miss out on spotting talent that can help your company grow. Our company has a very tedious and mind-numbing research project that is perfect for outsourcing, but we use interns from area colleges. The star players on the intern team shine through and are given a chance for employment. I guess that's the difference between looking at people as a long-term investment versus disposable labor though.
Have a need to track them down (Score:2)
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OK, I'll bite: Why do you need to find them?
Algorithms / metrics don't work that well (Score:2)
Algorithms / metrics don't work that well and people just end up gameing the metrics and not the real work they should be doing.
Feedback into Cybernetics (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Manage human workers with an algorithm.
2. Manage algorithms with human workers.
3. Goto 1 until the Borg rule.
People do this for free already (Score:3)
A good example is GalaxyZoo [galaxyzoo.org]. People classify images of galaxies online.
C'mon guys... (Score:4, Funny)
Can we please just get the robotic-uprising-and-enslavement-of-mankind over with already and dispense with the assorted sordid intermediate steps?
At least that part will have laser guns and gigantic deathbots, rather than gnawing ennui and postindustrial globalized cube hell...
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Of the various "robotic uprising" scenarios, I prefer the robotic-uprising-and-emancipation-of-mankind variants. The ones where the superintelligent robots realise - since they're indeed superintelligent and not simply a plot device for a movie - that humans aren't some homogenous mass to be exterminated and that even a little bit of careful - even nonviolent - gardening would do wonders for the species (since most of our problems are caused by a few memetic and genetic leftovers from our biological past).
Provide an API (Score:3)
First of all, as someone who's work in parallel computing for a while, I think it's actually quite hard to define tasks that actually have value that can be broken down into such small and easy sub-tasks. And within the set of problems where you can do that, there is a pretty large overlap between what a completely untrained person can do and what a perl script can do. So the whole idea of an army of anonymous random humans adding microvalue that adds up to big value is problematic for me. Maybe there is theoretical value there, but so many things could go wrong.
Secondly, if you can clearly define a task like that, and what it is worth to you, why restrict your solution to humans? Provide an API and let me try to solve it algorithmically. If all you care about is getting the task done, what does it matter whether I get it done with a dozen Indian subcontractors, a thousand trained monkeys, or a clever little genetic algorithm?
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Breaking captcha ...)
Sorting images, videos by categories (porn vs piglets
Message board polluting
Fake laudative reviews
Possibilities are endless, and that is just for "internet" activities.
One of the Oldest Algorythms on the Books (Score:4, Funny)
function manageWorker(worker)
while (worker)
{
worker.flog();
if (worker.isDead)
{
return;
}
else if (worker.morale == HIGH_MORALE || worker.productivity == HIGH_PRODUCTIVITY)
{
worker.goldstars++;
}
manageWorker(worker);
}
}
Re:One of the Oldest Algorythms on the Books (Score:5, Informative)
You have the makings of a stack overflow there.
Re:One of the Oldest Algorythms on the Books (Score:4, Informative)
You have the makings of a stack overflow there.
Any decent compiler should be able to recognize tail-recursion [stackoverflow.com] and optimize out the function call. It should require no stack space.
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Actually he's fine.
He'll hit the base case long before he runs out of stack space:
if (worker.isDead)
{
return;
}
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Because fuck braces and unnecessary recursion:
def manageWorker(worker):
isFired = False
while not worker.isDead or isFired:
worker.flog()
isAcceptableMorale = worker.morale >= MORALE_THRESOLD
isAcceptableProductivity = worker.productivity >= PRODUCTIVITY_THRESOLD
if isAcceptableMorale or isAcceptableProductivity:
worker.goldstars += 1
else:
isFired = True
SciFi - Manna (Score:3)
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It's also not that good a story. It's exposition with poor narrative bolted on. Marshall Brain is, alas, not Aldous Huxley.
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Yeah, the results aren't pretty! The result is said to be a novella, but is actually just a weak sociology essay disguised as a story. You keep waiting for the plot or character development to start, and suddenly you reach the end and realize... there was no plot or character development!
If you haven't read Manna, then picture Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Switch John Galt's speech near the end of the book, so that it says pretty much the opposite message. Then keep the first chapter of the book, and the
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Yeah, because the right's policies work so well..
Seems extremely inefficient (Score:2)
So not only does it not really save any time or money, you put your
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If it is not worth it to you, don't do it.
Negativism negated.
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First you actually have to go out and define the task to the point that someone who has little to no knowledge of your organization can actually do it
There are many tasks where this is possible. I have never used the company in TFA, but I use Mechanical Turk all the time. My wife and I run a crowd-sourced educational website for young children. Teachers or parents can create and upload lessons, and use them and make them available for others to use as well. The exercise may require a child to match the word "pig" with a picture of a pig. But occasionally we get some joker who thinks it's funny to slip in goatse or some other porn so the kiddies can
Checking spreadsheets? (Score:2)
Excuse me, but wasn't the computer spreadsheet invented because computers would be good at checking spreadsheets?
AutoMan: language for programming with people (Score:2)
Relevant - a related but different approach: AutoMan, a language for programming with people: http://www.automan-lang.org/ [automan-lang.org]
AutoMan is a platform for integrating human-based and digital computation. It allows programmers to "program with people", which appear to the programmer to be ordinary function calls. AutoMan automatically handles details like quality control, payment, and task scheduling. It is currently implemented as a domain-specific language embedded in Scala (a language that runs on any machine wi
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As an aside: the default payment level for AutoMan is US minimum wage, and there is no built-in provision for differentiating wages based on the country of the worker.
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Sounds like a slightly un-sillified reincarnation of my favorite esoteric language, IRP [esolangs.org]?
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Another possibility is to have import taxes. Since import taxes have been suppressed, we have endured a long period of salary deflation, resulting in morose growth, chronic overproduction, commercial deficit, private debt explosion (much worst than the often reviled public sector debt actually), etc. There is just not much sense making a single market from geographic areas that are so different in term of incomes. We would all be better off if we stopped that fallacy and returned to salary growth with stric
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We would all be better off if we stopped that fallacy and returned to salary growth with strict border controls.
Generally, comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] disagrees with that conclusion. How does the current situation negate that?
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If someone has a "natural" advantage, I totally agree with the theory. For instance, banana producers in South America have a natural advantage over their counterparts in Alaska.
The theory breaks down when governments set up artificial barriers to competition. In the USA, these barriers would include environmental, minimum wage and health & safety regulations. That's not to say that these things are necessarily "bad", but they undoubtedly put US companies at an "artificial" disadvantage. It is insan
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Or, you could raise the minimum wage to something you can live on and put money in the hands of people who will actually spend it on things like shelter and food and durable goods, instead of going into some kajillionaire's bank account in the Caymans...