MTurk Needs Healthy Competition: Enter Effect.AI - Effect2018

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.

Most Mechanical Turk tasks paid 10 cents or less
source

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!