MTurk Needs Healthy Competition
Amazon’s 12-year monopoly on the Turking market has lead to disgruntled employees and an uprising, calling for change. Many of the 500,000 to 1,000,000 Turkers nestled in the MTurk machine are looking elsewhere for micro-task work.
The Pew Research Center has found that 52% of Turkers earn less than $5 an hour working for Amazon. 91% earn below $8 an hour. And many Turkers report that even when they do earn, the checks often get lost in transit, or never get sent at all. Many Turkers live in developing countries and struggle to support their families.
Enter Effect.AI
Because Amazon relies on so many people for Turking, and many of those people are unhappy, Amazon is starting to make some changes to the payroll system. But newer companies like Effect.AI are swooping in and changing the scenery altogether by
- offering much better (and more reliable) compensation
- creating a decentralized location for more developers to join the marketplace and offer more jobs, and
- providing a powerful cloud-based computing system to bring together and improve upon all of the AI developments up to that point.
PHASE 1 - Effect Force: Decentralized Mechanical Turk
In their first stage of development alone, Effect.AI already brings healthy competition to the AI market. Effect Force, the Mechanical Turk phase, will offer two things to the AI market not currently available through MTurk:
Workers will be paid immediately, in EFX tokens that operate on the NEO blockchain. This stable, open-ledger approach leads to transparency and accountability in business transactions, which results in a healthier, more robust marketplace.
Requestors (who need the work done) pay the Turkers directly -- there is no middleman. This allows business owners and developers to pay their Turkers more generously, also leading to a more robust marketplace.
Global Implications
Expanding and improving the market for Artificial Intelligence training (or Turking) has far-reaching implications not only for the progress of AI itself, but for developing countries and their economies as well.
There is a reason developing their Turking workforce is the first of their three-phase program. Effect.AI believes a company can only be as successful as its smallest member. I am very excited to see a good company offer a better workplace for Turkers around the globe, thereby resulting in a far superior product, better business practice, higher computing power, and a better worldwide economy in the end.
Join Up!
Join with Effect.AI on the Effect.AI Telegram and receive updates on the progress of each phase. Or pick up some tokens for your portfolio. You can be a part of something revolutionary too!
More Information & Resources:
Effect.AI Website
Effect.AI WhitePaper
Effect.AI LightPaper
Effect.AI YouTube
Effect.AI Medium
Effect.AI Facebook
Effect.AI Twitter
Effect.AI Telegram
Effect.AI Review/Explanation Video
Effect.AI Writing Contest Here
Thank you for sharing... please, note that Mturk is only available to US workers, so that bit about Mturk users being from developing countries might need some fact checking.
That said, I think the work you guys are trying to do; Amazon Mturk is a huge mess for the following reasons:
All of these are tiring , and sadly, there is no viable Mturk competition at the meoment.
Effect.Ai has a demonstrable real world use case and I believe the project will take off and achieve mass adoption when it is rolled out.
Thanks for sharing this... I shall an eye for Effect.Ai
All the best,
Diana
Thanks, Diana! I appreciate all your great comments. It's true. The whole paycheck thing is stupid. Too many employees are banding together complaining about the "check's in the mail" issue. Not sure I'm on the same page as far as fact checking though. I'll have to look into that. My sources say otherwise.
But the use case for blockchain here is pretty intense. I think the immediate payment is great, for one. And the computing power will be a good one as well. To say nothing of the marketplace. I'm excited about these guys. I'm not an employee for this company - just doing a quick write up on them for a writing contest. I'm enthusiastic about the subject and about them.
great and so valuable comment @kopt33
MmnnnnTurkey. But with A1 sauce? Don't get it.
Hi
I just had a chance to read your post fully. little bit to late to be able to upvote. sorry
Really good piece of work. Im following all originalworks contenst and I know that this is second time they want people to write about effect.ai.
competition seem to be fierce and I must admit that your post is one of my fav so far.
You mind if i would ask you few questions?
cheers,
piotr