A meteorite named Amazon
There is no area of the new economy where Amazon does not have some more or less significant presence. They started with books 20 years ago and then became there'Everything Storyand worldwide. Today, Amazon has a higher market capitalization than Walmart. Not content with being the largest e-commerce in the world, a position today undermined by the Chinese of Alibaba, they have expanded to other and unthinkable areas. They did so either directly or through the personal initiatives of his multitalented boss, Jeff Bezos. For example, Amazon Web Service is the world's largest provider of cloud services; Amazon Studios produces innovative films and television series. If you have Sky or Premium we recommend you Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle o Black is the New Orange. Delicious, fresh and above all courageous. If you need a plumber, just rely on Amazon Home Services. In Italy, however, you have to look for it yourself. A legendary newspaper like the "Washington Post" is benefiting enormously from the contribution of Bezos, who bought it at bargain prices from the founding family. In the Washington editorial office, the fibrillation is back like in the old days. LGBT rights movements are receiving large donations from the head of Amazon and his wife Mackenzie. Two award-winning series produced by Amazon studios gracefully treat LGBT stories. In short, when we say that Amazon is sprawling, without giving any connotation to this adjective, we are not far from the truth. One thing is certain, where Amazon arrives is like a meteorite raining into the pond. It is also happening in the labor market of the intellectual and manual professions.
Human component and software
La Research carried on by Stanford University, resulting in the "emotional mapping" of the Victorian London, it's really unique. We dealt with it in the previous post. It is because, using the recent computational criticism, associate literature e in an investigation which, relying on statistical basis, aims to rebuild a map emotional of the locations of London of the early nineteenth century. Thus he manages to combine elements that we would imagine among them to the antipodes, almost antithetical and irreconcilable: the pathos of creation & literature and the calculation cold and analytical of a . It is even more unique, as the outcome which follows is then a map which is articulated not exclusively in function and on the basis of precise physical references, rather on what more immaterial one can imagine: i feelings that accompany them. An unusually peculiar map, therefore, founded on geography of places and emotions that are found connected to these places, by minutely analyzing the contemporary literary heritage.
How, then, was it possible to examine emotions? Perhaps the researchers of the Stanford Literary Lab Have they managed to equip their machines with the ability to experience and discern feelings? The answer of course is no. If they had succeeded, the research would not only be considered singular, but absolutely sensational. It was actually one collaboration between mens e driving feel. There are still operations, tasks, that machines, despite their enormous computing capacity, are not able to perform, while they are even trivial for man. Therefore the human component proceeded to identify and catalog le emotions and the component to process and analyze il matter.
This form of collaboration man-machine has a name: crowdworking. And it bears an inescapable, necessary, even if not sufficient, prerequisite: the development and potential of the web. The crowdsourcing, word composed of crowd (crowd) and outsourcing (outsourcing of part of one's own activities), as he reminds us Wikipedia, is phenomenon somewhat discussed and controversial, which presents implications significant, due to its own effects economic, but also social and ethics.
In its best forms it represents the use of the contribution and the collaboration of the most effective energy and visions present on the network, aimed atimplementation of a project. A sharing and distribution of work that should favor the to release byideas and creative ways ed innovative of realization. In his deteriorate forms actually takes the form of an uncontrolled and indistinct outsourcing of costs, obligations and constraints by the client, in order to have them fall on the shoulders of the fucks (crowd) of the community. It therefore takes the form of one indiscriminate exploitation of a multitude of very cheap labor, which can be recruited instantly to carry out tasks hyper-partitioned (microtasking), often repetitive and of short duration, whose final purpose and overall meaning is often known only to the applicant. A way of working that evades and frustrates social agreements from which the contractor benefits above all.
The spread of these forms of work or liquid collaboration è in forte rise thanks to the opportunities offered by the growth of Network. It is through the Net that they organize themselves, it is through the Net that recruitment and job completion mostly take place, it is thanks to the Net that shot down constraints and limitations, not least those dictated so far by geography of places and distances. The Net, however, just as it brings together, unites and levels, at the same time distances, divides and exacerbates inequalities.
Research marries crowdsourcing thanks to the Web
THEsurvey the Stanford Literary Lab has took shape in websites. It is with the help of the web that we have been able to carry it out, and it is on the web that it finds its place. The researchers did appeal one tool very specific, the Amazon crowdsourcing platform: Mechanical Turk. In this they have supported an increasingly widespread trend in the field of research. Until recently, the guinea pigs and subjects thanks to which many scientific studies were conducted were students, material plentiful and affordable within universities. Today, students are often displaced, for the purposes of analysis, by a new sample that is equally abundant and cheap: the crowd of the Net, the people of the web, who can be recruited through the various crowdsourcing platforms. Such platforms, however, are not the only ways in which the approaches materialize crowd indeed, in many cases the research does appeal to the involvement and help of individual communities or specifications category, with positive effects, even on the social side, which benefit both scholars and the other subjects involved.
Amazon Mechanical Turk. A global market of human "components".
The case of the Mechanical Turk, indeed, is quite special. In the words of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, his tried it would be to create a kind of "artificial artificial intelligence», i.e. a hybrid man-machine mechanism. In fact, in its ganglia, as in the case of theautomaton native, human beings lurk who carry out those tasks (HIT, Human Intelligent Tasks) that the machine is not able to carry out. Amazon paints its platform as a «job market» where «… companies and developers have access to a scalable, on-demand workforce». To the workers (Workers) there is nothing left to do but evaluate whether what is offered by contractors (Requesters) is convenient or not. Actually, the wages they are often low and can also be unsafe. The Requesters can refuse the work carried out, not paying for it and not even the acceptance of the contractor is sufficient guarantee of an effective payment. Amazon, for its part, in the face of a 10% percentage received on each transaction, declines all responsibility and refuses any involvement. The workers of these crowdsourcing platforms, as well as those of the work on demand, recruited via a cell phone app, they are considered gods contractor, of independent professionals, sharing their obligations and tax regimes, resulting excluded from those protections that are instead reserved for employed work. Often, however, they are de facto subjected to a whole series of impositions and constraints typical of dependent work. The wages, then, in the vast majority of cases, are not those of a professional, and sometimes not even those of an employee.
New alienations, old inequalities
Il Turco and similar crowd platforms have been defined as «… virtual assembly lines». Actually the creature di Amazon seems push yourself over the classic Assembly line, albeit incorporeal and evanescent. It twists at the foundationswork organization, parceling it out and overturning the relationship between mens e driving feel. THE'human being he is still reduced to acting as a mere components of driving feel, an appendix of this, delegated to make up for the deficiencies of the automaton.
In contrast, the'immateriality of the system leaves i workers alone, missing and disaggregated and, what is even more paradoxical, isolated, in a universe, the web, which makes connection its own flag and where, in the era sharing economy, sharing and collaboration are required. A loneliness that becomes patent abandonment in the case of relationships between worker e requester, left to the regulation of an alleged market, actually based on a huge disparity di power. The alienation of the assembly line is accompanied by a new one, without replacing it. An alienation that goes in the direction of virtuality, dictated by bringing man ever closer to machine, with the individual who, deprived of the founding attributes of his own humanity, loses awareness di sé, the sense of their work and your own sociality.
Will we all be robots?
Yet the materiality of the discomfort is excruciating and evident. It is a profound malaise that leads workers to ask to be recognized, above all as human beings, as living and thinking people, with their own needs and aspirations. The password of one campaign of emails to Jeff Bezos, launched by the Turkers in December 2014 is, in the words of Christy Milland: «I'm a human being, not an algorithm».
Analogous is the request for recognition and dignity of workers on demand of companies like Handy: «We are not robots, we are not a remote control, we are individuals». These words have already been heard on other occasions throughout history, however today the man-machine relationship seems to have undergone a further transformation and to have crossed a new frontier. For the benefit of the human being or dno? So are we all about to become robots? Two questions that still await an answer, but that doesn't seem so comforting.
