In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers.
That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives
But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.
Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it.
No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.
Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue.
I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.
Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc
People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.
I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.
No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and dignity.
I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth stating anyway.
Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is a problem with our society.
Words influence how we feel about others. We should use words that affirm the dignity of others, then work to make that a reality. Just because most people treat other people like cogs doesn't mean that we should throw in the towel and accept it; much less start doing it ourselves.
I agree that putting a bow on nastiness is messed up, but the root problem is the jerks. If we stop even thinking in terms of people having dignity, the jerks have won one more step. We should spread kindness and dignity wherever we can, and try to get people to name things that imply dignity.
I agree there is a major problem of people with less pay being treated poorly. It seems respect is only given to the high paid, but that is messed up when you stop to think about it. Our real worth isn't determined by our financial status. What if we lose the financial status? Would our friends desert us, our rights be removed, and we end up forgotten?
I for one want to work against the world becoming more like that.
And there are people who hate compliments.
So it’s funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs) who hate that they aren’t recognized and then there’s cogs who hate when they are recognized.
Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing other than the complimenter has some process for complimenting people.
I personally don’t enjoy giving some one no additional money or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying. You’re treating them like cogs by not paying them much.
This is exactly how you create an environment that is just asking for regulation and rightly so if you show such disregard for other people.
Explicitly treating human laborers in more-or-less the same way you treat a machine is unethical design as well as being an ugly and harmful philosophy. You are literally building a system that enables dehumanizing labor. Is this the kind of future you're happy being a part of building?
I'm curious about your thoughts about an internal questions I had in my head.
What is different from this than say hired labor for picking up produce or something to that extent?
I've worked a few very dehumanizing programming jobs where I didn't have any agency and just worked to someone else's instructions without any room for input. Some people enjoy programming against a clear specification but I don't think anyone really wants to be a code monkey[0].
I think managers and job creators (like those building products in this space) need to think carefully about the humans they create jobs for. Just because someone is willing to do a soul destroying job for some amount of money doesn't mean that the job's designer is freed from the duty to consider the impacts of the job itself. Jobs are, after all, not just a contract between inanimate objects but context of work for human beings - efficiency and economics can't be the only considerations.
Participation in building structures like these carries with it an ethical responsibility which can't be ignored - especially where the harms are so blatantly dehumanizing.
[0] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=code%20monke...
As opposed to the rest of us building systems that will put thousands out of jobs en masse?
Sure, there should be regulation regarding minimum pay and such. But an idea like this is not unethical on its own. It's unethical when combined with a society that is prepped to view automation as a danger instead of a savior, because the moonshot idea that we could just work less in the information age seems to be obliterated at this point.
Paired with some capabilities for building custom interfaces (if that doesn’t already exist), this would allow many less savvy companies slowly integrate their human processes into their software processes. Of course there’s something to be said about making human redundancy so interactive and personal for the victim, but from a cost savings/business standpoint it’s probably hard to ignore the potential value.
Good luck! I may pitch this to my team next time we need something semi-automated (btw you’re kind of competing with Slack bots, that’s what we use now.)
This way, I've already seen on TV what "Human Kubernetes" looks like. Resistance is futile.
--
[0] - Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History.
[1] - Curiously, it's also the etymological root of cybernetics; cybernetics -> cyborg -> the Borg.
But yeah, it could be a fancy new word for VC haha.
[] yes
[] no
0) Why is this better than MTurk's predefined workflows?
1) How much does it cost?? MTurk charges min(0.005, 10%) for each Human Intelligence Task.
2) How is quality checked???
3) People doing tasks generally report greater satisfaction and generally produce greater accuracy with a smaller topic shift (instead of doing NLP classification about everything at all times, first do topic A, then topic B). I bet you could train a simple classifier to group topics together
Maybe the the abject alienation from the product of one’s labor is a bad idea...
I find the comments that want to spin cogs into a good thing by changing the name and manipulating the imaging so lowly people don’t know how you they are really viewed, worse than any thing this app is doing, satire or not.
I think a lot of devs eventually realize that the whole "gig economy", as it is, is essentially an API for humans.
I also agree that, on the off chance this isn't satire, its current, honest form is much better than the proposed "marketability improvements" would make it.
With that said, I see a big blocker to many use cases. One of the main reasons you add humans to workflows is to deal with unstructured data, which can often be sensitive. Have you considered offering a managed service or self-hosted option so that orgs can control their own data flow?
I have a friend who is a regex expert and can answer in seconds what takes me hours. But I’d never want a thousand people to ask vim each arcane question in case ve also knows the answer for that topic.
What's the pricing structure?
I'm interpreting that it's like taking the features of a PowerBI app, but something with less overhead, and more accessible to smaller orgs.
What other similar solution are in this space?
If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and it's better to call a spade a spade.
There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a different name and not encouraging your butchers to see themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple Grandin's books provide this insight)
Speaking of political correctness..
I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when people learn. As opposed to other “quirky” names that aren’t clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.
No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".
