I was going to make a joke about how it's all just a big mechanical turk (the miraculous chess-playing "automaton" from the 1700s that was really a guy in a cabinet moving chess pieces), only to discover Amazon calls its international outsourcing product...drumroll....
This actually used to pay much better, many years ago.
I used to do a bit when money was tight.
It's not worth it without knowledge of how to use scripts and bots no; All of the tolerable tasks get scooped up too fast for a normal person to compete for them.
I just remember that if you wanted to earn more than about 15 cents per job, you had to have a higher rating, and getting it proved impossible.
And a bunch of jobs were so buggy that you couldn't complete them, so you'd get penalized for non-completion.
Also you can do a bunch of tasks and then they can reject them with no explanation and no pay. You can send an email asking why they didn’t accept them but they don’t respond. So Amazon is allowing these people to take labor and not pay even the pennies that were promised.
That place is literally the worst, the worst ever, the ABSOLUTE WORST. I tried doing gigs there for a few months while unemployed (trying to get a high enough rating for better paying Mechanical Turk jobs) and it left me so distraught that I started having suicidal thoughts.
Amazon would rather pay nothing to 1,000 people than pay a living wage to probably 100 store employees. And someone on a zoom meet
bobble headed along thinking that was The Idea of the Year
Reminds me of old palaces where there were hidden passages for the servants. So that they could appear and disappear as you desired, but not be seen in between. Very much the same mindset.
"...And if it wasn't for you pesky kids and your dog, I'd... well actually, WE have pretty much gotten away with it. All of the time, actually. Should I bother keeping the mask on?"
Things are going to be really stupid for a few years until AI technology catches up to the ambitions of its supporters…or until we discover that it never will.
I think there’s potential with AI, but I’m also not sure it can do anything useful at this point. It’s only impressive because we know that computers couldn’t write a decent resume or generate a picture before, but the resume and the picture aren’t objectively good on their own
Makes me think of “On our Watch” an Italian black comedy about the gig-economy. The title in Italian is (roughly) the more appropriate “And we, like assholes, stood by and watched”
it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_noi_c...
