The introduction talks about what is the ghost work. People who are hired by APIs to do some work which cannot be solved by artificial intelligence are called ghost work. They may determine whether some posts contain adult content or whether the person log in to the account is the account holder. These people are like ghosts since none of the APP users or the programmers do not recognize their appearance. Chapter 1 mainly discusses about the occurrence and development of ghost work. MTurk was built when amazon facing problem with correcting e-book information. Afterwards, they used this API to hire students to do the job and more companies paid them to get similar service. With years of development, the API can let workers do macro-tasks under the leading of full-time employees. However, there are also problems in such ghost work. The hired workers can hardly protect their own profits and companies can hardly find the cracker when issue occurs.
Reflection:
This kind of ghost work is beneficial for both the companies and the workers. The workers from poor areas can make profit doing such kind of job. In the example, a skilled worker can make salary of $40 per day, which is relatively high in some areas, for example, small towns in China. Also, this kind of job can be completed without time and area limitation. This means housewives or retired people can do such kind of job.
In the meanwhile, companies can make profits too. Due to there is no time and area limitations, companies can always find cheap labor. This means companies can save expanse on hiring and make more profits. Because they can hire people all over the world, they have workers work in different hours in the day. This is similar like they are hiring 24-hour workers, which means more profits and better user-experience.
However, this kind of ghost work contains risks too. When problems occur, companies can hardly find the crackers as they are hiring too many workers without knowing who they are. Also, human make mistakes. As a result, these hired workers are likely to make mistakes when doing tasks. One more points is that the companies do not know the background of the hired people. Sometimes the hired workers may be really bad. In the worst case, they can hardly understand the words on screen and the results will be not trustworthy.
For the employees, no one can ensure their rights. When companies refused to pay their salary, they can find nowhere to ask their salary back. Also, when they hardly solve some problems, they may find someone else has solved these problems and they can get no salary. One more point is that it cannot be ensured that there are tasks whenever. There may be limited tasks in some workers’ working time, which will make these workers receive limited salary.
Questions:
Is there any policy currently to protect the users of these APIs, both companies and hired workers?
How can the workers protect themselves when the companies refuse to pay their salary?
How to deal with mistakes caused by the workers? Any remedies or punishments?
