I was quite surprised when I read the column by Matt Prewitt '08 on Mechanical Turk in Monday's edition of The Herald ("Labor goes cyberpunk," Nov. 27). I was not taken aback by the concept of Mechanical Turk itself, which allows online "Turkers" to offer their services in performing menial tasks in exchange for a token payment. Rather, I was surprised that Mechanical Turk could be represented as a possible future for the labor market.
Prewitt seems to view this new method of exchanging services as revolution in conventional forms of labor, or a natural enhancement of the division of labor. The more serious consequence, I think, stems from the division of time Mechanical Turk implies. Forget productivity for a second; how healthy would it be to fill all your spare time with menial work, as Prewitt says, instead of playing java games or otherwise relaxing?
I can almost find myself rehashing counterarguments made to Adam Smith's original ideas on the division of labor: Mechanical Turk may benefit productivity overall, but it encourages rather repetitive unintelligent tasks - the very type of tasks for which Mechanical Turk was specifically made.
The added problem of envisioning M-Turk as a replacement for the labor market is that, as Prewitt himself points out, it "isn't intended to be a serious source of income." Couple that with the fact that the tasks in question appear sporadically and at unreliable intervals, and you have to conclude that this market is at best unstable, at worst chaotic, involving much time and little benefit for the "Turkers" who take advantage of it.
I was even more surprised by the implication that Prewitt makes when he points out that many people in the world live on less than a dollar a day, and that for them doing menial tasks on the computer could be a real economic opportunity. I ask in turn: How many people living on less than a dollar a day have a computer and reliable Internet access?
In fact, very few "Turkers" (on the labor side of the equation) benefit from Mechanical Turk. Amazon.com, which runs the site, certainly benefits, since it receives a commission on all the exchanges performed on the site.
What about the people posting tasks? There were many users and a very high activity when Mechanical Turk first started out in November 2005. That community increased in size until mid to late December of that same year, at which point site activity spiraled to the level it currently maintains. The reason for this was simple. Mechanical Turk used to offer a larger variety of tasks to perform. It was not long before several intelligent users found that two types of tasks in particular could be exploited: special scripts were made that would immediately give the correct answer to select and submit as a completed task, effectively cutting the time of completion of one two-cent task by 20. I soon found myself at my computer for hours at a time simply clicking a button, and collecting two cents for every click, making close to $20 an hour. Mechanical Turk's slogan is "Artificial Artificial Intelligence." We had made it into Artificial, Artificial, Artifical Intelligence.
After mid December, these tasks were abruptly dropped from the list. As a result, most of the members left, leaving the present shell of a community. Ironically, when the exploitable tasks disappeared, so did the activity. By the end of November 2005, I estimate there to have been, at any given time, in between 250,000 and 450,000 individual tasks available. Today, that number is a scant 3,000 to 10,000. M-Turk has become a slow-moving, all but forgotten site.
I understand, however, what drove Prewitt to write the column that he did, and I even share some of his dreams. How great would it be if you could consult a lawyer or other specialist personally through an online directory service? The prospect of a hyper-efficient marketplace is alluring, but there are many problems behind this idea of deeper-than-ever labor division, whose goal is to make humans ever more like machines through a segmentation of labor that gives every individual a specific, repetitive task.
Mechanical Turk is like "the Turk," that "chess playing automaton" from which is gets its name: an illusion, too good to be true.
Moctar Aboubacar '10 believes that someday, in the distant future, machines will be replaced by humans.
