
Google hired microworkers to train its controversial Project Maven AI - anastalaz
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4/18211155/google-microworkers-maven-ai-train-pentagon-pay-salary
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all_blue_chucks
This is standard practice in AI training. There are countless workers in Asia
(typically) who are perfectly willing to help train your algo for less pay
than Western workers, and the location where the work is performed doesn't
matter at all.

What _would_ be news is if Google were paying $11/hr + social security, etc.
just to have people tell an algo which pictures have a dog in them. That would
put them at a competitive disadvantage.

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kartan
> What would be news is if Google were paying $11/hr + social security, etc.
> just to have people tell an algo which pictures have a dog in them. That
> would put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Yes. Sometimes maximizing profits and having a functional society where
everyone has a meal and home is incompatible. I would prefer to see that the
long term viability of countries is put higher up than the short term profits
of companies. And that is why it is so important to set all countries to the
same standards of living (on the high-end preferably).

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int_19h
The companies are not going to do that sort of thing out of kindness. It's up
to society to set up the appropriate tax regime.

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dawhizkid
It's worrisome to me that a U.S. company helping the U.S. military is viewed
as so controversial that it would cease to finish that work. I'm glad Amazon
and Microsoft, among big tech cos, haven't caved in like Google has.

And yet Google has the gall to spend $5m on a Super Bowl ad touting how it
helps veterans. Ridiculous.

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ocdtrekkie
I see a huge difference between "not helping the military" and "not helping
create autonomous weapons". And our drone program is hardly military, it's a
mostly CIA-led project to assassinate people without due process in areas we
are not at war.

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dlp211
You have no idea what you are talking about. The vast majority of drone use is
for military surveillance that have no strike capabilities, and are used to
determine whether to put soldiers on the ground. Good drone surveillance is
literally the best resource we have for preventing bad military outcomes. It
saves lives, both American and other.

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saagarjha
The problem is that technology developed for "good" drone surveillance can be
transferred quite easily to drones with strike capabilities.

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dlp211
And by extension be able to make better and more accurate decisions leaving
more people alive. I fail to see the issue here.

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saagarjha
We seem to have an issue where we we end up targeting the wrong people, and
this will make it possible to do so more accurately and easily.

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furyg3
> he workers were hired through a crowdsourcing gig company outfit called
> Figure Eight, which pays as little at $1 an hour for people to perform
> short, seemingly mindless tasks.

Wow. Shouldn't there be a 'minimum gig fee' for this type of work? I mean many
tasks may take a few seconds for a few cents, but if you work a solid hour and
only earn $1 gross income, that seems extremely exploitative (even if the
recipients are in Burundi).

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c0achmcguirk
I've picked up a few gigs on Mechanical Turk. You pick up the tasks that are
worth your time (that you are qualified for). If you don't like the microtask
for the price offered move onto the next one.

If the entity offering the microtasks (gig) don't see enough interest in their
tasks, they can raise the bid.

I think that's extremely fair. Let the market dictate the price per task. How
do you know what the right price should be?

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demarq
Is the market really dictating anything at that price or is it desperate.

I don't think anyone with the power to dictate would accept a dollar an hour.

The right word for this is exploitation. Google and Figure Eight directly
contributing to income inequality.

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ChuckMcM
Except you have captured the essence of the market, a 'fair' price (in market
terms) is one that leaves the seller thinking they got too little and the
buyer thinking they paid too much. They were both right at the equilibrium
point.

Exploitation occurs when you prevent the buyers or sellers in the market any
ability to move. So if these buyers have no other opportunities or ways to
change they can be exploited, if the sellers don't have any other buyers they
can be exploited.

Neither Crowd Flower (Figure 8) nor Mechanical Turk "exploit" workers because
the workers have a choice of tasks, and the option to add skills to open up
other tasks. Nor can the workers "exploit" the people offering jobs because
they cannot prevent another worker from taking a job at an offered price, even
if they personally wouldn't take the job at that price.

What it does do though is allow workers who have a lower cost of living and
expense rate to bid lower (or take jobs that pay less) and still cover there
costs.

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IggleSniggle
There is a time limit on securing food and shelter. If you spend 20 hours on
being a Turk, that’s time lost doing something that may never sustain you or
provide a road to sustaining yourself. But you don’t know that until you spend
the time engaging with the system. And you may find yourself stuck, chasing
short term prices, having lost your ability to move in the marketplace.

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ChuckMcM
I don't disagree, that is one of the interesting concepts in the book on
scarcity[1]. If you're operating at the limits of your demand for a resource
it affects the way to reason about that resource and can lead to counter
productive choices.

That said, if you aren't constrained to _only_ doing mechanical turk or figure
8 things, then you have the option of doing something different, or adding in
other resource streams. You you trade off the time vs money aspects of
different work situations to achieve longer term stability. That doesn't apply
of course to people who have extenuating circumstances that cut them off from
any other revenue stream and that makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

[1] "Scarcity: Why having so little means so much", Sendhil Mullainathan

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samcday
Because the only thing better than building an AI to help identify people to
kill with impunity, is building an AI to help identify peopl to kill with
impunity using slave labor.

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YaxelPerez
[https://joeyh.name/blog/pics/recaptcha.png](https://joeyh.name/blog/pics/recaptcha.png)

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zavi
That's how you label your data. Nothing newsworthy here.

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fenwick67
They need better terminology. "microworkers" sounds bad, like they're under-
payed (they are).

Try "organic AI" or "incentivized crowdsourcing".

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yellow_postit
mTurk, Crowd Flower, Spare 5, etc. are all popular platforms for gathering
labeled training data. It’s a race to the bottom for lowest price per label
while maintaining reasonably consistent quality.

