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Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' workforce is one of the companies in the new 'share' economy
ND-Dem has addressed a number of Amazon's offenses against it's workers, including low-wages and deplorable working conditions, and hiring H1-B workers instead of US workers. Now consider Robert's Reich's newest post: The Share-the-Scraps-Economy:
How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?
Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.
Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.
Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.
Amazon isn't the only offender; but, it's practices are deplorable:
Consider Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.” Amazon calls it “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.”
In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents.
The original Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton that made the rounds in 18th Century Europe and (reputedly) fooled notables such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Now, Amazon is using the term to describe it's crowdsourcing marketplace that turns humans into automatons working for less than minimum wage.
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