Mechanical Turk: The Future of the Virtual Workplace?

Any task, any time -- someone will do it

Sean Richardson interviews Peter Cohen from Mechanical Turk

Peter Cohen is the guru behind the Mechanical Turk project at Amazon.com, perhaps the most mind-bendingly cool gig one could hope to land and straight out of the X-Files. He is one of the people determining the future of the interaction between human and machine. Whether or not a "robot" will be able to effectively replace your significant other or merely clean your house is determined by the likes of Cohen. Thousands of contributors at Mechanical Turk toil away, producing impressive ideas and products. The potential for this kind of crowdsourced labor is still unfolding. But what is clear right now is that none of Mechanical Turk's contributors who tackle the many "human intelligence tasks" (HITs) are getting rich from working for Mechanical Turk, nor are they getting hired by Amazon.

Sean Richardson: What has surprised you about the development of the Mechanical Turk project during its "beta stage" and in the application and usage of it by participants?

Peter Cohen: We were very surprised by how quickly Mechanical Turk grabbed the popular imagination right from the time it launched. Since launch we have seen a steady increase in the number of Requesters who are using Mechanical Turk for an ever-broader set of applications. When we were developing the product we certainly had ideas about how it could be applied but also made sure that we weren't creating artificial restrictions on how it could be used. We intentionally wanted to be surprised by the kinds of problems people used Mechanical Turk to solve. For instance, early on one Requester used Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 people to submit hand-drawn pictures of sheep. More recently, someone used Mechanical Turk as a way to generate collaborative content to generate a book. Other applications include everything from cleaning up product information by identifying duplicate data, identifying images in pictures, finding specific content in documents, transcribing audio and video content, gathering data from diverse sources, and authoring original content. We were also pleased that Mechanical Turk had broad appeal to Workers. We have participants from more than 100 countries, making this a truly international marketplace.

Q: What does it mean to say that humans are being "re-integrated" into the processes that we were promised computers were to fulfill? Do you feel that computers will ever be able to replace "human" processes or are human and machine destined to be forever intertwined?

A: Some of the problems we generally believed computers would be able to solve turned out to be more complex than we originally thought. While computers are great at performing large numbers of complex computations and processing huge amounts of data, they still lack the cognitive and associative abilities that all human beings are born with. People can apply experience and judgment and reach conclusions that are far more accurate than computers can currently. Over time, computers will inevitably become more proficient at a greater number of tasks that previously required human input. This is terrific since it means that we can continually raise the bar and apply the value that people contribute to more and more complex and valuable types of problem-solving. Combining the unique abilities of both humans and computers allows us to build solutions and solve problems where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Q: Some critics feel that Mechanical Turk's wages are exploitative (e.g., US $5 paid to an unemployment programmer for a US $2,000 outsourcing job), others feel that it is the classic example of the free market at work. Is this just the "democratization of work" in action? Is such fragmentation of the work process inevitable?

A: Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for human intelligence. Like any marketplace, supply and demand determines the price for a given task. People will accept and complete tasks they feel are worth their time and effort. In many ways we have created opportunities for people to earn money that were not available before. Similarly, we have given Requesters new ways to efficiently get tasks completed that in many cases were previously not possible. For many kinds of complex tasks it makes sense to break them into smaller pieces that individuals can complete parallel to others. This makes the individual tasks simpler and allows the whole task to be completed quicker and more efficiently. The demographic profile of Mechanical Turk Workers is quite diverse and ranges, from people for whom completing HITs is a hobby that they do in their spare time, to others who derive significant income from the tasks they complete.

Q: What does Amazon ultimately hope to gain from Mechanical Turk? By that, I mean is this pure R&D or does Amazon see a real revenue generation potential from internal use or licensing?

A: We have not disclosed financial projections for our Amazon Web Services division (of which Amazon Mechanical Turk is a part), but we have said that we do see this division one day being a meaningful part of Amazon.com's revenue. It is not purely R&D.

Q: Has Amazon actually hired any Mechanical Turk Workers to work in-house for Amazon?

A: We have not hired any Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers.

(Edited by Daren Brabham)