A "Like" on Facebook. Filling out a questionnaire. Describing a photo. Translating a food label. How much would you pay someone to do these things for you? Five cents? Ten? These are small, almost insignificant tasks, but they are completely beyond the reach of a computer. That's when Mechanical Turk appears, a crowdsourcing service maintained by Amazon that brings together half a million users, who turned "Turking" into a way of life.
Home to "the most abused workers in the world", "digital sweatshop", "cradle of modern slavery" and other terrible epithets have been used to describe Mechanical Turk, a micro-task platform that Amazon released to the public in 2005. Mechanical Turk's early steps (whose name is inspired by the famous Turk, the fake chess-playing automaton) were as an internal Amazon tool that detected duplicates in the descriptions of its pages, but it wouldn't be long before it transformed into what it is today. Basically, it works like this: Someone posts a job on the site and indicates how much they pay. The "employee" accepts the job, delivers it, and the requester decides whether to approve it or not. If everything goes well, the employee receives payment; otherwise, the requester pays not a cent, and also keeps the completed work.
Seen from that angle, all the criticism about Mechanical Turk seems justified. The regulation of this market is practically nonexistent, leading to the aforementioned abuse. Why do people use it then? The answer is simple: Each person is a universe, and the circumstances that lead them to Mechanical Turk are very different. Recently, The New Yorker published a four-minute short called Turking for a Living. The Turkers agreed to be part of the video for a small fee, just a few cents. Thus we discover healthy, educated young people who see it as a simple pastime, unemployed people over 50 who can't get back in the game, people with medical conditions confined to their homes, ex-convicts who can't find alternative work because of their records, and single mothers living on food stamps or government subsidies.
The salary of each Turker varies greatly. Some aim very high, seeking about $20 a day, which is much more than a full time commitment. The average these days seems to hover around one or two dollars an hour, and as expected, those who offer work on the site must pay 10 percent to Amazon as a commission. The point is that there are hundreds of thousands of people for whom Mechanical Turk is their only option. Over time, other portals have emerged that apply similar mechanisms: simple jobs, very low pay, and fierce competition among workers. Will things change for the better? Only time will tell, no matter how much necessity wears the face of a heretic.
