|
|
|
Transition from Outsourcing to CrowdSourcing
A decade ago we saw the onslaught of job or work outsourcing. Hundreds of jobs and employment opportunities migrated with companies from the West to Asian and BRIC nations where the labour was cheap. There was a nameless entity attached to the goods we were consuming. Somebody in China in an unknown factory was making the clothes we were wearing. Some unknown person was designing the latest software being sold in stores in America. Outsourcing has now given way to crowdsourcing which is the equivalent of the hive mentality. This is all due to the massive expanses in the Internet and Web Technologies. Amazon has come up with their latest platform of these micro tasks in their platform called Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is the commoditization of digital labour and a perfect example of crowdsourcing using the new media.
What is the Mechanical Turk Platform?
Mechanical Turk is the Agent Framework at the back end of the Amazon Web Services network which allows companies and vendors to break up their mundane routine jobs into smaller micro tasks which can then be put up for people to take up and complete. In return the monetary reward is of micro size as appropriate for the task completed. So, for example, I may put up a task such as go to a mall and write a 500 word article on what you see happening in the mall. This in turn may be part of a larger task, which the company needs to get done. What the Mechanical Turk platform allows is through its set of API to programmatically plug in Human Intelligence into the Web Agent Framework. This is important because some of the tasks cannot be done efficiently by machines.
The World Is Flat Again!!!
A very interesting phenomenon which the Mechanical Turk platform introduces is that we see even American labour competing for these microtasks and micropayments. Hence, cheap labour has shifted from the Asian countries to even America. This is a good example of better utilization of time and earning some money in the process. Vendors have access to a global workforce 24X7 and people can avoid wasting their time just whiling away watching some useless TV program or making a window shopping trip to the nearest mall. |
|
|
