A Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop by Ellen Cushing

Utne Reader, Jan-Feb 2013

The Turk or Mechanical Turk or Automatron[1] Chess Player was a hoax of the late 1700s. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine.

“The funny thing about the biggest shift in production in years is that almost nobody knows it happened. Which makes sense, if you think about it: It occurred invisibly, online, anonymously, all over the world, but at the same time, nowhere in particular. And it’s poised—if most people who know about it are to be believed—to completely change the way we think about work, the way we consume technology, and the way the global economy functions.

It’s called microtasking[2], and it works by outsourcing small, virtual tasks to an army of online workers, who then perform them for pennies. These tasks vary widely in scope and substance, but what links them all is that they’re essentially too difficult or too dependent on human analysis for a computer to do, but too simple for skilled labor. And they’re the bedrock of the internet.

Crowdsourced[3] microtasking—conducted largely via Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk site—is now a multimillion-dollar industry, and one that doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Even as the global economy continues to falter, Turk is thriving, due in no small part to what it can do for companies under pressure to do more with less.

“There’s this sort of competitive insanity of the business environment,” said Six Silberman, a longtime observer of the field who helped create a forum, Turkopticon, for people doing this kind of work. “And everyone’s trying to cut costs as strenuously and as rapidly as possible.” In a globalized economy, that’s easy to do: Mechanical Turkers—even those who live in the U.S.—make somewhere around $1.50 an hour on average, enjoy no worker protections, and have no benefits.”

Read more at Utne Reader.

 Bezos describes the work as “artificial artificial intelligence”. Hence the nod to the Mechanical Turk.

It’s not only being used to add a few bucks to people’s income, it’s being used to replace a lost job.

Laws don’t exist to cover this type of work.

The output of a Turker can be rejected for any reason and the Turker gets no feedback, just the rejection.

This is another commercialization of the trend begun by open source projects[4] in the world of programming.

It’s touted as a revolution as important as the industrial revolution and the future for the Internet.

In my opinion, it’s a trend headed in exactly the wrong direction. It’s the industrial revolution on steroids – hierarchy, segmentalism, exploitation, fragmentation, purposelessness, siloing, soullessness and all the other ills we should be trying to get away from. It like the Mechanical Turk is a fraud, a cruel hoax, perpetrated on the people.

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[1] “An automaton is a self-operating machine. The word is sometimes used to describe an old-fashioned robot, more specifically an autonomous robot.” Wikipedia

[2] “Microtasking is the act of breaking a large project into tiny, well defined tasks. The resultant microtasks are proposed to a crowd and are characterized because: it can be performed independently, it requires human participation or intelligence (so it cannot be performed automatically by a computer) and because it can be done in a short period of time. Some experts, like Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk, indicates that this “short period” should be less than an hour.”  Crowd Sourcing Blog

[3] “Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. Crowdsourcing is different from an ordinary outsourcing since it is a task or problem that is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body. Crowdsourcing is related to, but not the same as, human-based computation, which refers to the ways in which humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two methods can be used together to accomplish tasks.” Wikipedia

[4] “In production and development, open source is a philosophy, or pragmatic methodology that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details. Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of terms for the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. The open-source software movement arose to clarify the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.” Wikipedia

Future Food Crisis

Utne Reader has three very important articles justifying the comment that there is a food crisis in our future:

The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester brown

“The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of food scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/environment/food-scarcity-zm0z13jfzwil.aspx#ixzz2IpnXkRtr

 

The abrupt rise in world grain prices between 2007 and 2008 left more people hungry than at any time in history. It also spawned numerous food protests and riots. In Thailand, rice was so valuable that farmers took to guarding their ripened fields at night. In Egypt, fights in the long lines for state-subsidized bread led to six deaths. In poverty-stricken Haiti, days of rioting left five people dead and forced the Prime Minister to resign. In Mexico, the government was alarmed when huge crowds of tortilla protestors took to the streets.

After the doubling of world grain prices between 2007 and mid-2008, prices dropped somewhat during the recession, but this was short-lived. Three years later, high food prices helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system. Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early 21st-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archeological sites we now study?”

Several conclusions from this article:

• ·         Food prices are rising faster than incomes
• ·         Crop diversity is decreasing
• ·         Just in time paradigm is reducing surpluses
• ·         The number of poor people entering the “real hunger game” is increasing
• ·         “Each year the world adds nearly 80 million people. Tonight there will be 219,000 people at the dinner table who were not there last night, many of them with empty plates. Tomorrow night there will be another 219,000 people. Relentless population growth is putting excessive pressure on local land and water resources in many countries, making it difficult if not impossible for farmers to keep pace.”
• ·         Global warming will exacerbate the problem
• ·         Prices of food are exaggerated because of “Wall Street” speculation

Bet the Farm: Spinning Wheat into Gold by Suzanne Lindgren

“In 2009, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization made headlines when it announced that a billion people would go hungry that year. By way of explanation, the organization offered a deduction: The economic downturn paired with the rising cost of food staples had set the price of basic sustenance beyond reach for one in seven people around the world. But part of this equation went unexplained. Why was the price of food so high in a world where farmers, amazingly, grew more than enough to feed everyone?”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/politics/bet-the-farm-zm0z13jfzlin.aspx#ixzz2IprrsYa8

Nine Meals Away from Anarchy by Wayne Roberts

“Civilization is only “nine meals away from anarchy,” said the head of the UK’s Countryside Agency, Lord Cameron of Dillington. The Lord liked the statement so much that he repeated it in 2007, again to widespread media coverage, warning that on day three, “there will be rats, mayhem, and maybe even murder.”

Lord Cameron’s alarm resonates with a fear—that the veneer of order, complacency, and civilization depends on food being readily and effortlessly available, which in turn hangs on threads of transit routes that can be shut down on a moment’s notice. Chain reactions could be critical with frightening speed, thanks to both the short timeline from disruption to collapse of a logistics system, and the short fuse from civility to civil breakdown when food runs out.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/environment/nine-meals-away-from-anarchy-zm0z13jfzros.aspx#ixzz2IpsibaBV

In addition, all three of these articles are describing different elements of a complex system that will experience “Normal Accidents”.

Scared Heart

When I was a young kid, probably just learning to read, I used to read the signs as my Dad was driving. We lived in Houston, but the families lived in Galveston. So we drove a lot from Houston to Galveston. There was a Catholic church along our route. I read the name and it made no sense to me. Having no knowledge of the Catholic religion, that’s probably not surprising. I asked my Mom and Dad, “What does scared heart mean?” My Dad asked, “What are you talking about?” I responded, “Well the name of that church is Scared Heart.” They laughed and told me that it was called Sacred Heart. Embarrassed, I became silent.

Recently, I had the second heart atrial ablation to remedy a persistent atrial fibrillation problem I had. 

The ablation of atrial fibrillation is an invasive technique that is used in the treatment of Atrial fibrillation one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias. Ablation is the removal or melting away of an unwanted structure or tissue. Ablation of atrial fibrillation can be accomplished with different techniques; the most established approach is via radio frequency ablation around the pulmonary veins, which are the veins that bring oxygenated blood from the lungs back to the upper chambers or atria, in the left side of the heart. In other words, it’s the modern version of the medieval cauterization, albeit for a different purpose.

The purpose of this procedure is to create scar tissue around the area where extraneous nerve signals are created that interfere with the normal sinus rhythm. This scar tissue stops those unwanted impulses from traveling. Oh, and it’s inside your heart.

I had to have the second procedure in part because, as my electrophysiologist discovered during the second surgery, the scar tissue did not form completely. My heart healed without the scar tissue required. It tried to go back to the way it was.

There are many reasons to have atrial fibrillation and I don’t know what caused mine. It was a chronic problem from my 40s, an infrequent event then and a constant state in December of 2011. My own theory is that I abused my endocrine system with constant stress, caffeine and sugar in a 30 year career with IBM and 20 year stint in my consulting company. It’s the old flight or fight syndrome where circumstances require that you deny both -- too much adrenaline and no way to dissipate it.

In simpler terms, my heart was scared. Nerve patterns were established. Scarring of the heart was the last remedy. My sacred heart has been scared and now scarred.

So, my childhood reading was more accurate than I thought.

Life Wants to be a Mess

"Life wants to be a mess."
Amy Gray
Judging Amy, Imbroglio Episode

I' aware that this is a quote from a TV show episode. The full quote is, "You can't control life. It's like water seeking its own level. Life wants to be a mess. Don't ask me why."

I've tried to find the source of that quote, if there is one, beyond the TV script. But, I haven't found one. A similar one is used in James Doran's microblog. If you find the source, let me know.

My life experience and thought convinces me that this is a true statement. Life does like messes. It certainly is Margaret Wheatley's view as expressed in her book, A Simpler Way:

"Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Everything is changing all the time: individuals, systems, environments, the rules, the processes of evolutions. Even change changes. Every organism reinterprets the rules, creates exceptions for itself, creates new rules.

Life uses messes to get well-ordered solutions. Life doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness. It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, unending trials and errors to find what works.

Life is intent on finding what works, not what's 'right'. It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.

Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities. There are no 'windows of opportunity', narrow openings in the fabric of space-time that soon disappear forever. Possibilities beget more possibilities; they are infinite.

Life is attracted to order. It experiments until it discovers how to form a system that can support diverse members. Individuals search out a wide range of possible relationships to discover whether they can organize into life-sustaining system. These explorations continue until a system is discovered. The system then provides stability for its members, so that individuals are less buffeted by change.

Life organizes around identity. Every living thing acts to develop and preserve itself. Identity is the filter that every organism or system uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships, changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.

Everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. There are no unaffected outsiders. No one system dictates conditions to another. All participate together in creating the conditions of their interdependence." Read complete summary at http://www.scribd.com/doc/32610950/A-Simpler-Way.

Hope Against Hope

by Eric Utne

Note: This is an essay by Eric Utne in the Utne Reader, Nov-Dec, 2012, p92. I don't often copy someone's essay and place in on my blog, but this was so well stated I wanted to share it with you without my interpretation. Please subscribe to Utne Reader. It's a wonderful, valuable asset.

I don't know about you, but I've been very disappointed by Barack Obama's presidency. Yet, despite of my disappointment' I'm going to do everything I can to support his reelection. 

Like so many people, I was inspired by his "hope" speech at the Democratic National Convention eight years ago. And I was truly engaged by his promising "Change You Can Believe In" campaign four years ago. In his Grant Park victory speech, President-elect Obama spoke directly to the young people who'd done so much to win him the vote: "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there:'

The joyous faces of the people who flocked to Washington for the historic inaugural reflected the county's deep longing for the change that Obama's election promised. That election seemed to herald a new era that would get our country back on a more democratic and progressive path. Our expectations were high. We looked forward to stronger environmental protections, the development of renewable energy
and the creation of green jobs. We assumed that the growing threats to civil liberties, most grievously on display at Guantanamo Bay, would be reversed and that our government would once again champion the cause of social justice. We were thrilled to think at long last that Americans would have universal health care. I even assumed that the Serve America program, which advocated volunteer service for all ages, would be implemented. We began to imagine that the U.S. could have more harmonious and collaborative relations at home and abroad. Most urgently, the U.S. and world financial system had nearly collapsed and we expected that at the very least the fiscal recklessness of the financial sector that had caused such harm would lead to prudent and stringent financial regulations. I even half-expected leading Wall Street bankers to be put in stocks and publicly pilloried in Zuccotti Park. Wouldn't that have been satisfying?

Like many people, I'm appalled by the political gridlock in Washington and the cynicism that infects the political process. It is hopeless, you might say. But it was Bill Clinton, the man from Hope, Arkansas, himself, who turned me around by his speech at this year's DNC, with comments like this, "President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No president-not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you'll renew the President's contract you will feel it. I believe that with all my heart"

But Clinton won me over not so much by what he said as by who he is as a human being. It's not his gift for "splainin' stuff," or his ability to work with people from all sides to get things done that impresses struggles-his characteristic "I feel your pain”

I believe that Clinton's social compassion and empathy for others hold the key to what we need to do to get past the polarization and divisiveness that distorts our democracy. Social and emotional intelligence. Empathy. The ability and willingness to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes. This is not the laissezfaire, survival of the fittest, AynRandian way that currently grips some leaders of the Right.

Mystic philosopher and social innovator Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), predicted that modern society would become ever more individualistic, eventually reaching a paralytic point of divisiveness- "a war of all against all.” He saw individuation as an evolutionary step beyond group identification based on blood kinship and ethnicity. Individuation allows people to develop their unique gifts and abilities. But, Steiner said, individuation is not the end point of human evolution. Individuation tends to lead to isolation, alienation, and loneliness. We evolve beyond individualism when we develop our capacity for empathy and by creating diverse communities based not on blood kinship but on our common humanity.

When accepting his party's nomination for a second term as president, Obama echoed his 2008 Grant Park speech with these words, "America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer-but we trawl it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up .... "

This is the language for the future. Our hope lies in our compassion for our fellows and our recognition that we’re all in this together. E pluribus unum.