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The computer is the new sewing machine: benefits and perils of crowdsourcing

Published: 28 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

There is increased participation by the developing world in the global manufacturing marketplace: the sewing machine in Bangladesh can be a means to support an entire family. Crowdsourcing for cognitive tasks consists of asking humans for questions that are otherwise impossible to answer by algorithms, e.g., is this image pornographic, are these two addresses the same, what is the translation for this text in French? In the last five years, there has been an exponential growth in the size of the global cognitive marketplace: Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk has an estimated 500,000 active workers in over 100 countries, and there are dozens of other companies in this space. This turns the computer into a modern-day sewing machine, where cognitive work of various levels of difficulty will pay anywhere from 5 to 50 dollars a day. Unlike outsourcing, which usually requires college education, competence at these tasks might be a month or even less of training. At its best, this could be a powerful bootstrap for a billion people. At its worst, this can lead to unprecedented exploitation. In this panel, we discuss the technical, social and economic questions and implications that a global cognitive marketplace raises.

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  • (2023)Editorial: Human-centered AI: Crowd computingFrontiers in Artificial Intelligence10.3389/frai.2023.11610066Online publication date: 15-Mar-2023
  • (2021)The Psychological Well-Being of Content ModeratorsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445092(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2020)Prospect Theory Based Crowdsourcing for Classification in the Presence of SpammersIEEE Transactions on Signal Processing10.1109/TSP.2020.300675468(4083-4093)Online publication date: 2020
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  1. The computer is the new sewing machine: benefits and perils of crowdsourcing

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '11: Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
    March 2011
    552 pages
    ISBN:9781450306379
    DOI:10.1145/1963192

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 28 March 2011

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    1. WWW 2011 panel
    2. crowdsourcing
    3. mechanical turk

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    WWW '11
    WWW '11: 20th International World Wide Web Conference
    March 28 - April 1, 2011
    Hyderabad, India

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    View all
    • (2023)Editorial: Human-centered AI: Crowd computingFrontiers in Artificial Intelligence10.3389/frai.2023.11610066Online publication date: 15-Mar-2023
    • (2021)The Psychological Well-Being of Content ModeratorsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445092(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2020)Prospect Theory Based Crowdsourcing for Classification in the Presence of SpammersIEEE Transactions on Signal Processing10.1109/TSP.2020.300675468(4083-4093)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2019)Crowd-powered Interfaces for Creative Design ThinkingProceedings of the 2019 Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3325480.3326553(722-729)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2019
    • (2019)DC2S2Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290607.3299027(1-8)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
    • (2018)Crowdsourcing and Human Computation: IntroductionEncyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-1-4939-7131-2_107(499-510)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
    • (2017)Does Confidence Reporting from the Crowd Benefit Crowdsourcing Performance?Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing10.1145/3055601.3055607(49-54)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2017
    • (2017)Multi-Object Classification via Crowdsourcing With a Reject OptionIEEE Transactions on Signal Processing10.1109/TSP.2016.263003865:4(1068-1081)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
    • (2017)Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, IntroductionEncyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-1-4614-7163-9_107-1(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2017
    • (2014)Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, IntroductionEncyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-1-4614-6170-8_107(304-315)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2014
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