transcribing audio, tagging images with descriptive text, or answering surveys on various topics. The products of this labor might serve many purposes ranging from spam generation to training machine learning algorithms that would eventually assume some of these human roles in the future. The payment amount per HIT ranges from one cent to several U.S. dollars, depending on the required time or difficulty of the task.
Amazon.com's initial motivation to build Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) emerged after the failure of its artificial intelligence programs in the task of finding duplicate product pages on its retail website (Pontin 2007). After à series offutile and expensive attempts, the project engineers turned to humans to work behind computers within a streamlined web-based system. Later, AMT made this cognitive labor platform available to private contractors in return for a commission for each completed HIT. AMT's digital workshop emulates artificial intelligence systems by replacing computing with human brainpower. Driven by what AMT calls “artificial artificial intelligence," this sociotechnical system represents a crucial formation on a global scale as it facilitates the supply of cognitive labor needs of mainly Western information and communication technologies industries from a global workforce.² AMT explains the value of its labor market for the software industry asfollows:
With Amazon Mechanical Turk, it may seem to your customers that your application is somehow using advanced artificial intelligence to accomplish tasks, but in reality it is the “Artificial Artificial Intelligence" of the Mechanical Turk workforce that is helping you effectively achieve your business objectives.3
According to Panos Iperiotis, approximately half of the AMT workers—or Turkers, as some of them prefer to call themselves—are from the United States, and the other half are from 66 different countries. Most of the non-U.S. Turkers are from India, representing 33% of the AMT workforce (Iperiotis, 2010). Ross et al. have demonstrated that the demographics of AMT are becoming increasingly international, highlighted by an expanding group of young, male, Indian workers who make less than US\$10,000 per year. About a third of Indian workers reported that they partly rely on AMT “to make basic ends meet" (Ross et al. 2010).
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InterrogatingModes of Digital Labor