You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans.
In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers.
That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives
But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.
Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue.
I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.
I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.
> No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.
Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc
I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are doing to people's self image.
People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.
Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job.
I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.
Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts.
If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".
This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid.
Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.
I think the name is clever and a bit cute, though perhaps easy to misinterpret. But on point of principle:
No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and dignity.
I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth stating anyway.
Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is a problem with our society.
Words influence how we feel about others. We should use words that affirm the dignity of others, then work to make that a reality. Just because most people treat other people like cogs doesn't mean that we should throw in the towel and accept it; much less start doing it ourselves.
I agree that putting a bow on nastiness is messed up, but the root problem is the jerks. If we stop even thinking in terms of people having dignity, the jerks have won one more step. We should spread kindness and dignity wherever we can, and try to get people to name things that imply dignity.
I agree there is a major problem of people with less pay being treated poorly. It seems respect is only given to the high paid, but that is messed up when you stop to think about it. Our real worth isn't determined by our financial status. What if we lose the financial status? Would our friends desert us, our rights be removed, and we end up forgotten?
I for one want to work against the world becoming more like that.
I don’t want “respect” or whatever other ways things are being framed if I’m being paid a low wage. I always found it insulting when done. When I was treated more like a cog in line with my pay, I don’t remember having any specific consistent resentment or annoyance.
This is my own personal life anecdote.
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It also isn’t just pay. Being all cute and “nice” and “respectful” but on top of low pay, not being flexible with something like taking half a day off or coming in late or leaving early because of life stuff, shows how the company and higher ups truly feel about you.
Most of the time lower wages correlates with the loss of the above flexibility. There are major exceptions like when the job is interchangeable and you can swap shifts with others.
At that point. The company knows you’re a cog. Treats you as a cog, but sometimes spins things as if you’re a person that matters to them.
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Edit: I do agree jerks suck. I guess I see putting a bow on stuff as jerk material as it is generally done with cogs.
True I agree with that. It can feel like a cynical slap if they cover up your low status and try to make you feel good about it. I try to coach and mentor my employees and see what they value. I totally recognize that isn't common in management.
Def depends on the job too. I was referring to jobs that paid under $20 an hour in 2021 dollars.
Even though I haven’t begun turning my life around until I passed my 20s. Still, my next job will be as a developer. In that case, a lot of the issues won’t be the same. Even though I’ll be a “lowly web dev cog”, I’ll hopefully be paid decently enough, and be either remote or in the high flying New York area, or some other major metro area.
It is a lot easier to swallow a lot of the issues if my salary is above the median and mean average and on pace to be six figures in a few years.
I think I’d like you as a manager, haha. If it is fine, could you email me at the address in my profile? Assuming you manage tech employees, I’d like to ask about a thing or two. No pressure.
You can call people "sanitation engineers", "sandwich artists", or whatever (these are real titles by the way) and for as long as you treat them as replaceable, interchangeable, and cheap, they will be cogs.
Also are "production worker", "factory worker", "shipping clerk", or "driver" any better or worse than "human lambda"?
My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it revealed that there are some people who love compliments, just love them. Even if they aren’t genuine, they like hearing “You’re a rock star, I’m so grateful you’re here today” even if the person is completely unable to evaluate rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to everyone.
And there are people who hate compliments.
So it’s funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs) who hate that they aren’t recognized and then there’s cogs who hate when they are recognized.
Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing other than the complimenter has some process for complimenting people.
Haha this is a point I didn’t bring up but loosely in my opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is morally wrong.
The opposing view on here appears to be if you can compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that way, things are better. This view is self serving and for the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog.
Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I’ve added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on status quo :)
I’ve been a cog before and had hippie managers and asshole managers. Honestly, I prefer the occasional whip from the asshole than the constant stream of bullshit from hippies trying to tell me every day how my data entry was “awesome.” The weird thing is sometimes I think they convinced themself that our cog work was awesome.
If I’m a commodity, I’d rather be straight about it and have a shared reality since businesses will actually treat me like a commodity when it’s important.
Yes I responded very similarly in a nearby comment. Haven’t had such divergent managers. But have had asshole and normal enough ones. I know I didn’t like it when they thought my work was “awesome”. It would be miserable if they ended up actually believing that.
Your last sentence is key. Worded better than I have been able to word it throughout this entire thread
At that level, abstract logic becomes more important. Is it better to think of a flower in a field as part of a larger ecosystem, or characterize your company as a machine composed of cogs?
Characterizing the company and cogs as flowers as part of a larger ecosystem sounds and feels better. However if the treatment is the same as the cogs. Or worse with the platitudes, then it’s better for the company and higher ups. Worse for the flowers or cogs.
This is the same kind of bs that companies like Uber (and professors) pull to glorify low wages with phrases that glorify below minimum wage work. I like OPs approach let’s be honest about what this work is, make sure you pay what they deserve and don’t try to deceive anyone with fancy accounting.
Sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's just keep maximizing income inequality. This way there will always be someone in the position to treat humans like the cogs they are!
Which position are you taking? The OPs comment isn’t going to make income inequality any better. Does “respecting” people by not saying they are a cog when it is not true help or hurt income? I’m sure your sarcastic comment is pointing to one of these.
I personally don’t enjoy giving some one no additional money or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying. You’re treating them like cogs by not paying them much.
The OPs comment does affect income inequality when implemented at scale.
As easy as the implementation is for you and your team, those results have relatively little affect in the scheme of things. In order to make the suggestion a paradigm shift, money would be moved from the top to the bottom in an "at scale" implementation.
Edit: paying your workers less per output has essentially been the last major management paradigm to drive growth over the past 20+ years. The counter examples (Costco) are the exception.
> Outsource tedious, repetitive and boring work to our workforce in just a couple of clicks.
This is exactly how you create an environment that is just asking for regulation and rightly so if you show such disregard for other people.
Explicitly treating human laborers in more-or-less the same way you treat a machine is unethical design as well as being an ugly and harmful philosophy. You are literally building a system that enables dehumanizing labor. Is this the kind of future you're happy being a part of building?
There's a difference between fulfilling work and drudgery in every domain.
I've worked a few very dehumanizing programming jobs where I didn't have any agency and just worked to someone else's instructions without any room for input. Some people enjoy programming against a clear specification but I don't think anyone really wants to be a code monkey[0].
I think managers and job creators (like those building products in this space) need to think carefully about the humans they create jobs for. Just because someone is willing to do a soul destroying job for some amount of money doesn't mean that the job's designer is freed from the duty to consider the impacts of the job itself. Jobs are, after all, not just a contract between inanimate objects but context of work for human beings - efficiency and economics can't be the only considerations.
Participation in building structures like these carries with it an ethical responsibility which can't be ignored - especially where the harms are so blatantly dehumanizing.
> You are literally building a system that enables dehumanizing labor
As opposed to the rest of us building systems that will put thousands out of jobs en masse?
Sure, there should be regulation regarding minimum pay and such. But an idea like this is not unethical on its own. It's unethical when combined with a society that is prepped to view automation as a danger instead of a savior, because the moonshot idea that we could just work less in the information age seems to be obliterated at this point.
I actually think this is a great idea. If I’m understanding it correctly, it’s essentially Amazon MechanicalTurk for people in your company?
Paired with some capabilities for building custom interfaces (if that doesn’t already exist), this would allow many less savvy companies slowly integrate their human processes into their software processes. Of course there’s something to be said about making human redundancy so interactive and personal for the victim, but from a cost savings/business standpoint it’s probably hard to ignore the potential value.
Good luck! I may pitch this to my team next time we need something semi-automated (btw you’re kind of competing with Slack bots, that’s what we use now.)
Google keeps saying that Kubernetes is a real world, κυβερνήτης, Greek for "helmsman" or "pilot" or "governor"[0][1], but its predecessor was called Borg, so in my mind, the true meaning of "Kubernetes" was always "a network of (Borg) cubes".
This way, I've already seen on TV what "Human Kubernetes" looks like. Resistance is futile.
0) Why is this better than MTurk's predefined workflows?
1) How much does it cost?? MTurk charges min(0.005, 10%) for each Human Intelligence Task.
2) How is quality checked???
3) People doing tasks generally report greater satisfaction and generally produce greater accuracy with a smaller topic shift (instead of doing NLP classification about everything at all times, first do topic A, then topic B). I bet you could train a simple classifier to group topics together
A quick look over their docs, and I think this is a terrific product that needs a better landing page. They make it easy to build a custom task with a UI builder, and more importantly, they also automatically exposes programmatic means of adding tasks and receiving task completion data. This makes “do things that don’t scale” somewhat more scalable. Looking forward to trying it out!
I find the comments that want to spin cogs into a good thing by changing the name and manipulating the imaging so lowly people don’t know how you they are really viewed, worse than any thing this app is doing, satire or not.
I think a lot of devs eventually realize that the whole "gig economy", as it is, is essentially an API for humans.
I also agree that, on the off chance this isn't satire, its current, honest form is much better than the proposed "marketability improvements" would make it.
I passed this off to my brother and two friends. All who I know have used mechanical Turks for their academic work. None of them brought up the name or any weirdness. Nothing to write home about. But another anecdote for me
We had something like this for a project which would allow you to create multiple CDN accounts using a single interface. Where some CDN's could not be automated by API or we didn't have the time (yet) to implement. So the default API implementation was the FrankAPI (named after the guy handling the manual requests). It would create a pending database record and Frank would get an email with details and the instructions along with a link to a Django page to fill the record with details when the CDN was created. It was so simple and efficient. We loved the solution, he loved the solution. It was great. Though we where all more tech minded people, so talking with computers was natural to us. I don't know how these kind of interfaces would pan out for other kinds of people, if they would miss the human aspect in the interaction?
At my previous position (bank) we called this concept "baba layer". Baba in most slavic languages means "old woman". And when used this term "baba layer" was as an indicator that your system sucks (a bit) that you cant really automate some things away. Or as and easy "solution" to difficult problems. "Well, we just let baba layer solve this"
You're getting a lot of comments on the naming/presentation that I think are worth considering, but I want to say that the tool itself looks great. There are so many workflows that we twist into pretzels, and over-engineer one interface point or another, because we don't have a way to trivially put a human interface in the right spot. I will 100% try this.
With that said, I see a big blocker to many use cases. One of the main reasons you add humans to workflows is to deal with unstructured data, which can often be sensitive. Have you considered offering a managed service or self-hosted option so that orgs can control their own data flow?
I find these cognitive surplus [0] really promising. If not for identifying the people for whom a task is easy. It’s always neat to me how some things are easy or hard for people and the time is spent trying to match this effectively.
I have a friend who is a regex expert and can answer in seconds what takes me hours. But I’d never want a thousand people to ask vim each arcane question in case ve also knows the answer for that topic.
Impressive, we could instrument a lot of municipal licensing and public service form filling with these templates. It's like kiosk applications as a service.
I'm interpreting that it's like taking the features of a PowerBI app, but something with less overhead, and more accessible to smaller orgs.
So, from what I can tell it's essentially a Mechanical Turk for someone's personal team. However, I'm trying to figure out if it offers Mechanical Turk style offerings as well, where you can just pay for some random person to do the job?
If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and it's better to call a spade a spade.
That might not be a great example. The meat industry is pretty notorious for euphemisms. They're usually called "meat processing plants" rather than "slaughterhouses". When farmers need to conduct a mass extermination (more officially referred to as "depopulation"), one common technique is to shut off the air supply to the barn which causes the heat to rise so the animals suffocate and roast to death. The technical term for that technique is "ventilation shutdown". And that's all without getting into whether terms like "meat", "sausage", "beef", "pork", etc. are just polite ways of saying "parts of animal corpses" and "livestock" as "animals that we feel are acceptable to kill."
I think that is a difference between internal and external communication.
Within the industry in the UK at least, meat processing plants can be both 'kill-facilities' and 'no-kill facilities' which is specifying if they have a slaughterhouse in them or not, but the term meat processing plant includes both. The site operators will not shy away from what is happening - you can't when you are in the room when it happens, and it's actually worse for workers if you de-associate from it.
That doesn't mean when you write a press release you use these terms. External communication gets fluffed-up for the rest of the world, and you don't write 'kill facility' on your address in Google Maps because you don't want to get splattered in red paint.
There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a different name and not encouraging your butchers to see themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple Grandin's books provide this insight)
Any concern over it is very recent and ahistorical. Like the false etymologies of "rule of thumb", but far less well-established (and hopefully it remains poorly-established—there's plenty of justified language-policing, we don't need to make up reasons to do more of it)
Ironically your statement is an example of “political correctness gone mad” for me at least.
It’s a metaphor about shovels, there isn’t anything politically incorrect about it. Someone has just dreamed up an alternative meaning to be offended about.
As long as people are buying sausage, people will make and sell it.
And to extend the metaphor beyond where it should probably go, products taste better when sausage is added and people don't always need to know the ingredients.
Your data will have gone through something very similar to this a million times - it might have been validating your photo on a dating site or transcribing your receipt for expenses, but these sort of use-cases would not be done as cleanly if it wasn't for human in the loop.
Mechanical Turk is on of the best product names I’ve ever seen. It’s accurate. It has a clever story behind it that almost no one knew beforehand.
I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when people learn. As opposed to other “quirky” names that aren’t clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.
In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers.
That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives
But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.