BigShinyThing : emergent culture

A Good Deed from the Mechanical Turk, But…

Whoah. This out-Bruckheimers CSI. TechCrunch reports that:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task – the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

That’s pretty amazing. But to us, the most amazing thing is the phrase [Amazon] arranged for a satellite sweep of the area […].

Reality check, folks: this suggests that in 2007, an online bookshop has sufficient clout to book time on Low-Earth-Orbit surveillence satellites. You know, the kind that are handy plot devices for Tom Clancy and the writers of 24. What next? Some crowdsourced triangulation of my cellphone location arranged by eBay’s Special Ops team in preparation for an airstrike using A10s leased from the US Airforce by PayPal?

People, we live in scary scary times. But we hope they find Jim alive.

[UPDATE: OK, turns out the satellite is run by commercial ‘remote sensing’ business DigitalGlobe, not the military. We’re not sure if we find that reassuring, or the other thing…]

[UPDATE 20070208: One of the project members emailed us anonymously to clarify exactly what took place: in his/her words:

Gizmodo got this 100% completely and totally wrong: Amazon didn’t “arrange” for anything.

The New York Times piece on the search gets this correctly: a group of very high-powered Silicon Valley people (like Sergey Brin) helped get several other groups like Digital Globe and NASA to do satellite passes. MechTurk was just a clearinghouse for doing the work.

I think the confusion comes from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ blog where he said a few days ago that “Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly.” The “we” there wasn’t Amazon, it was probably a dozen people at various companies helping coordinate that effort.

Thanks for the email!]

The Ghosts in the Machine

Last year the New York Times wrote a story about so-called Gold Farms – factories where Chinese workers would labour through the initial stages of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft on behalf of wealthy Westerners who couldn’t be arsed. Well now Amazon have taken that model and formed a new business out of it.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is named after an automaton from the 18th century, ‘the Turk’, which could play chess. The wooden man, compete with turban, appeared to be powered by clockwork and even check-mated Benjamin Franklin at one point. The Turk was – of course – a fraud, with a human chess expert hidden in the rather obvious, rather huge box on which the model sat. Amazon have no interest in hiding their wizards in this way. For fees ranging from a few cents and not much more, workers – who call themselves 'turkers’ – will perform menial, time-consuming tasks – such as identifying nuances in colour or shape – which can still confound automated computer systems. Originally conceived by Amazon to assist its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies 'employ’ workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon, of course, takes a cut for every task performed.

Amazon says that Mturk provider “artificial artificial intelligence” which as a zeitgeist phrase is sure to produce more than one dissertation. According to Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services,

From a philosophical perspective, it’s really turning the traditional computing paradigm on its head. Usually people get help from computers to do tasks. In this case, it is computers getting help from people to do tasks.

Like all crowdsourcing, turking seems to thrive by provoking people’s need to contribute – to be part of something bigger. To test this, UCLA Design/Media Arts grad student Aaron Koblin invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end of experiment, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and put 10,000 of them up for sale at a rate of $20 for 20 sheep at The Sheep Market. This blatant profiteering had some turkers up in arms: “they’re selling our sheep!” was the cry on one message board. Another poster wrote, “Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?”. Of course they had. If there was ever a moral lesson to be learnt from Web 2.0, it’s always check the IP clauses. But even after the student stopped taking admissions for sheep, and after ruthlessly exploiting his workers, more people wrote to him wanting to contribute sheep for free. Koblin says:

“Most of these people clearly weren’t in it for the money. They weren’t doing it so they could get 2 cents. It was more about participating in something larger.

This is of course the philanthropic view. A more cynical take on turking and on the gold farms in particular is that it is just a new economy take on old economy exploitation. Labour activists and lawyers point to the total lack of workers’ rights. Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project says:

The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound. It’s day labor in the virtual world.

The workers themselves take a more relaxed view – arguing that it’s basically badly paid Sudoku. According to one, "I think it’s something of a hybrid between trying to make money on the side and a diversion, a substitute for doing a crossword puzzle. It’s sort of a mental exercise.”

MTV news has recently succeeded in getting hold of the first footage shot inside Chinese gold farms. According to the segment, half a million Chinese now make a living from the acquisition and sale of World of Warcraft gold to US and EU gamers. GigaOM has an interview with the filmmaker, Ge Jin:

GigaOM: What does WoW gold farming suggest about the future of work?

GJ: I think these gold farms indicate that the game platform has the potential to engage more people in Internet-driven economy. The gaming workers in China don’t have skills like English, software or graphic design to participate in other forms of Internet-driven work, but they can communicate and navigate in a 3D game world whose tools and routines they are familiar with… So if more social and economic activities happen in an accessible 3D game world, people who don’t have access to other culture capital but gaming knowledge will be more likely to be included in global interaction.

It makes you wonder if all those $100 laptops for kids aren’t actually going to bridge the digital divide but instead create a whole new economy of third-world labour.

Turking story source and quotes from Salon.

The Wisdom of Crowds

We’ve written about crowdsourcing before but only using artsy, slightly Utopian examples like the Swarm of Angels film projects. Now it appears that commerce is taking notice of the phenomenon.

According to the good old Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is

A term coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson in June 2006. It describes a business model akin to outsourcing, but relying upon unpaid or low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D. Crowds targeted for crowdsourcing include garage scientists, amateur videographers, freelancers, photo enthusiasts, data companies, writers, smart mobs and the electronic herd.

Whilst we don’t find the iPod flash mob at Liverpool Street Station particularly interesting, we do think that Netflix’s $1m prize R&D project is rather cool. Especially if they actually pull it off. Netflix has offered the prize to everyone and anyone who can come up with a better recommendation engine for their DVD rental service. In true Web 2.0 style, Netflix has said it will publish a detailed description of the winning approach for the benefit of companies, entrepreneurs and academicians.

Recommendation systems (based on the crowdsource-y idea of ‘collaborative filtering’) help consumers choose taste-based products by comparing people’s purchases with those of others who display similar tastes or purchasing preferences. “Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future,” said Netflix Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings. Well, the idea has certainly worked for Amazon!

After they’ve got their customers to figure that their film suggestions, maybe Netflix should ask them about how to sustain their business model: DVDs-by-post in a future of weightless media? Ah well…

Of course all the little Linux (their mascot, Tux the Penguin, is pictured) hackers have been doing this collaborative inventing for yonks… but now it appears to have tipped over to the mainstream.

Read more about the wisdom of crowds at Howe’s blog.

This post would have come via Sense.PSFK if their link worked x.