If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided to call "bums"), then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? Would this solve real problems for them on a daily basis? What happens when it's cold and snowy out? How many of them know how to use a computer, or read?
Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office, thinking that she knows what her customers want from her company's web site without ever asking them. Before you start throwing out solutions to urban poverty, you might want to at least talk to one or two of the people whose problems you are trying to solve.
As long it makes some people think what it's like to grow up poor. Me, I would suggest learning some history and philosophy before the monumental works of the "Lean Startup methodology".
In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it's couched in statements like the ones you see here that assume that people have chosen poverty -- but that's the basic sentiment.
> Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office...
Well, this is at least consistent. If you think that people have merely chosen to be poor, then you simply need to persuade them to make a different choice.
If one acknowledges that they don't know much about the lives of poor people, they should do what they would with any other domain where they lack experience -- find a domain expert. IMO, the best way to start would be to find those members of the urban poor demographic who have the intelligence and the motivation, but not the skills, to solve their own problems. Then, you can help them solve those problems.
This is more or less true. Go look up labor force participation rates of the poor - most poor adults don't have a job, and aren't looking for one.
The OP is advocating the installation of a terminal to see if the 'urban poor' use it. That sounds pretty lean to me.
Again, I'd like to attribute the responses to the commenters' young age, and I trust your good intentions, but hackers, engineers and all entrepreneurs should really learn something about work-relations, social policy and ethics.
I'll go with "yes". Doing productive work, earning money, and gaining basic computer experience would be much better for everyone involved than panhandling on the street.
In equally loaded terms, why would you deny poor people an opportunity to improve their lives?
Think about this: is this suggestion going to provide the poor with true social mobility? Is this something our society can be proud of - poor people working for machines, as machines and getting paid by machines? Or is this another way to maximize profit by forsaking gainful, respectful employment, that can be somehow justified by "well, they'll be slightly better off?"
Why not suggest a mechanism by which tech companies can truly offer the poor a hand that will last for generations and create a better society, one we can be truly proud of, even if it's at the cost of loss of some short-term profit? An investment in society's future, if you like. Surely this is something that will be beneficial for everyone in the long run.
I doubt young age of commenters is the reason for their stance and for many intentions are as good as they pay. Crucially, most people here imagine themselves as (future) bosses and do not empathize with the poor operating mechanical turks. Also consider that many here unconsciously are mechanical turk operators while believing they are entrepreneurs.
There are of course others here as well. But look at the brightness of your comment and you will find out who is the majority.
But I think you're wrong. I think what we're reading here is not a heartfelt, confident business or social ideology, but a hacker's frame of mind. A hacker mostly thinks about how to do things well. Sometimes he thinks about what to do. Only rarely does he consider the question of why, in the grand scheme of things. Very few hackers consider the social ramifications of technology, and when they do, it's usually very short-term.
If people are willing to do the work for a given wage, the free market should be able to pay them (or so Libertarians believe).
I'd like to suggest that instead of building work booths for the poor where machines will pay them money, perhaps the big companies should do everything in their power to make sure these people have a chance at a proper education, so that some day they could have jobs that would give them some dignity. Jobs that the mechanical-turk mega-farmers would wish for their children.
Until that happens, we have before us the suggestion to build working-booths for the poor, where they can simply walk in and work for us, and get paid directly by a money dispenser so that we won't even have to see them or talk to them. And they won't even have to commute - we'll build those hi-tech sweatshops right in their slums. We won't even know their names, and if one of them gets sick - well, someone else will take his place and we won't even have to know about it because we can't really be bothered by poor people and their problems. They should be thankful that we need cheap labor so much that we're even willing to employ them (as long as they don't have to come into the office) - it's certainly better than whatever they must be doing now; selling drugs, probably - after all, that's what poor people do, right? All we have to think about now is how to prevent them from cheating us and stealing our money.
How come people are so sure they can revolutionize the world with some stupid web or mobile app, sure that they can disrupt the market and unseat market leaders, but when it comes to social issues some of those very same people sound like slaves to power themselves? How come hackers who are supposedly able to "think outside the box" sound like old, bitter, fatalist, soulless conservatives?
As someone who turks occasionally, you can't consistently make $7 an hour unless you have some skill that you could probably use on the job marketplace. $3-$4 is more like it.
$3/hr on Turk is pretty good, and you need some education and diligence to do it.
Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated.
Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.
I say go for it.
Anyone have an concerns about the ethics of this? On one had 6 net is better than 0, on the other hand it is fairly predatory.
There were several problems: 1. Many of the more valuable task required you to meet certain 'skill' levels which these staff didn't 2. Motivation was a huge problem as spending hours per day clicking on images with people or editing text you don't understand was very dull 3. We had problems with internet bandwidth being too slow to allow running through tasks rapidly
It was a pity this experiment failed as it would have been a great way to scale up and create income opportunities for some very destitute people.
Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break.
If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.
First, you can't just give people cash. They will immediately turn to spamming, and you'll get crap data. You need to do statistics, comparing turks to other turks, and only pay the ones who don't spam. It's highly likely you can't do this in realtime.
Second, you need to track the identity of your turks. If worker X is known not to be a spammer, then you want to assign work to X preferentially. Similarly, if worker Y is a known spammer, you want to refuse him work.
Third, most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?
just because somebody is not looking for a structured job, doesn't mean they won't do tasks for money. think about the homeless guy who wanders around with his shopping cart collecting discarded cans all day. the only social issue i see with a turk kiosk is that it would essentially be a "do things in exchange for drugs" terminal.
When getting instant, reliable cash is the result, people will jump through an enormous number of hoops - and even pay money themselves the for opportunity.
For instance, you could require users to create an account on mturk and/or w/ the mturk shop so they can be tracked. If it is simple to do and prompted it should be fast an easy. If they can't even figure this out, they probably aren't qualified to be doing the work anyway.
http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-...
Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play.
Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.
A more beneficial concept for the poor is microlending, helping the poor in third-world countries start their own businesses.
If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)
I could categorise 50 images in 2-3 minutes. It'd take me 1-2 minutes to get out my wallet, get the right credit card and enter the info if I were to pay manually.
I ran the idea past two employees (neither homeless...) who both seemed to think they'd consider a quick spot of Turking in exchange for a digital good.
I thought the USA had "micro-lending", but they were called "payday loans"?
Micro lending has more of a humanitarian goal - most organizations tend to lend at reasonable rates (3-15%/year).
Payday shops charge reasonable fees per loan, the same fees that all vendors and governments charge for you hanging on to money they want from you. The problem is that payday loan customers get trapped into taking excessive numbers of loans, multiplying fees.
Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread.
Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage.
It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility.
One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.
Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum.
In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive enough to justify a higher wage. An employer will pick a mix other adaptations rather than simply 'the same number of employees at a higher cost' once the wage floor is enforced. (These might include shorter opening hours, more automation, a few higher-paid workers replacing many lower-paid workers, longer waiting lines, less customer service, less attention to cleaning/inventory, and outsourcing work to other lower-cost entities or countries.)
These dynamic adaptations leave a few people bumped up to the higher minimum, but more left completely unemployed, idle and dependent on other social assistance. They're not building work habits or a work history that would put them on the path to much higher wages.
Even if we wanted, as a society, to ensure a certain minimum wage, why would we make the responsibility for paying it fall solely on those particular companies and industries that can best utilize inexperienced and low-skilled labor? Their manufacturing and simple services fill a important role, in the goods they provide and the meaningful productive work they offer those without other skills. By making them and them alone face this costly extra non-market constraint on hiring, they become disadvantaged and shrink, relative to other sectors and overseas competitors.
It would be like deciding "every low-income family requires a computer", but rather than buying it out of common public funds, making it a legal requirement for just the domestic computer industry to provide free computers, out of their own revenues. Would that properly value the exact thing you want to happen – more computer production – or impair it by making it less profitable than other uses of the same talent/capital? The same goes with employment opportunities for the low-skilled. The minimum wage has been thinning such domestic opportunities out, for decades, rather than expanding them. Intended to reduce income disparities, it's increasing them.
This is in fact their purpose. Minimum wage laws destroy low-paying jobs by making them illegal, preventing the least competitive members of our society from having the hours and days of their lives "mined" by an employer for negligible compensation.
That having these laws "reduces welfare" is, I believe, a conclusion not supported by fact.
A living example can be found in urban Brazil. By failing to outlaw and enforce certain minima (building codes, wages), large Brazilian cities have created vast marginal neighborhoods that no one wants to live in.
Based just on the example of favelas alone, I would argue that having laws to guarantee minimum wages is one thing a government can do immediately to protect the weaker members of a society.
I think you have not addressed another important duty of governments: to provide a reasonably rigorous educational launchpad so that the less fortunate need not always remain so.
without the minimum you are correct that theoretically more jobs would exist, but at a pay rate so low that it would create an incentive not to work at all. the government assistance required for an employeed unskilled worker and an unemployed one would be about the same, whats the motivation to work?
Another solution would be to use worker reputation (something explored by Panos Ipeirotis @ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ )
Because MT workers are unreliable, you often need to have several doing the same task. Better workers require fewer checks, and are therefore much more cost effective. Right now MT is a market for lemons.
So the challenge then would be to let poor people build up a reputation to fix that market...
This is not the sort of disruption we want in the marketplace. Let's say someone rolls this out, with moderate success. What's to say a company like Wal-Mart wouldn't crowdsource stocking shelves? We already see some people taking advantage of low-income workers (giving less than 36 hours to avoid health insurance coverage, etc). This would be another opportunity to lower costs all around without much of an upside for those doing the work.
Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots.
Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced burger flippers and crowdsourced cleaners.
There's a lot of opportunity in automation of service businesses such as retailer and restaurants, but it seems like the industry does not take much interest in applying robotics to the task. This crowdsourcing system would be a way for nimbler companies to introduce more technology into the system without going through the management.
What mechanical turk does allow companies (and individuals) to do however is to hire people for a very short term (a few seconds) for, literally, pennies.
And assuming that enough work was available we should expect the rate to increase since there will be less spam bots.
And at any rate it is better than the alternative of make work.
This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.
There are also exceptions for people with disabilities, special minimum wages (you can actually pay the disabled less than minimum... sometimes), etc.
So, I think the basic answer is that you still have to respect minimum wage, but how you do that is pretty complex.
Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person.
And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.
No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine.
> And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.
Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...
Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream.
A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work?
On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare.
Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.
You know that there are loads of actual poor disabled people? Not everyone on social welfare is a leech on society. Have some compassion.
How about work as the incentive?
We have crappy parks and yet we give money to folks who don't work. That shouldn't be.
And don't give me "they can't afford day care". For every group of four parents on aid, one does day care for the other three while they work.
Crappy jobs are the best incentive.
Here's how I look at it. You can either apply force (by making the urban poor work at some crappy job) ; or you can apply attraction, and have them move themselves (by offering a significant economic incentive to work). Ye old carrot and stick solution. :)
I believe the former (stick) has been tried many times, and it doesn't work quite as well. People just don't like others telling them what to do.
But by giving a significant incentive (a carrot), you make the person themselves affect change; and it is more sustainable.
Anyways: these are just ideas that I'm hoping can spur some discussion. Looking at the number of urban poor, the current system isn't working.
Google what happened in New Jersey when they raised minimum wage above the federal level years ago (low paid jobs got wiped out, companies fired workers and attempted to become more efficient, particularly it hammered fast food workers).
Or this:
"Dr. Peter Brandon of the Institute for Research on Poverty studied how raising the minimum wage affect the transition from welfare to work. He found that raising it keeps welfare mothers on welfare longer. Mothers on welfare in states that raised their minimum wage remained on welfare 44 percent longer than mothers on welfare in states where it was not raised"
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/again...
You do understand the point I'm trying to make: that there should be _some_ _significant_ economic incentive for people to get off welfare and on to work! Right now the incentive is minimal at best.
So how do you create the gradient that moves people off of welfare and on to jobs? You can either take away welfare benefits; or you can give much more rewards for working.
1. should people be made to flip burgers or stand in cashier booths when society doesn't really need that. You can order off amazon for example, or eat healthier food that you make at home. Those burgers flippers could then instead be training to become engineers. It might take them longer than an academically gifted person, but they'd get womewhere if they didn't need to flip burgers everyday.
2. If you increase the price of labor by increasing the minimum wage, more opportunities for automation come into play. If burger's flippers were too expensive, restaurant chains might install robots that did it instead. Over time, burger slipping would be even cheaper than the previous minimum wage burger flipper.
