What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

by Ed Finn

Dedicated “turkers” earn about $5 an hour, and many of them reside in the United States (with India making up the second largest contingent).57 But it’s disingenuous even to speak of workers in the typical meaning of that term, or an hourly wage, since the system’s atomization offers no stability, regularity, or persistence of particular forms of labor, leading to huge variance in the amount of time it takes to complete a particular task. Just as many computer servers in the cloud sit idle (in 2012, McKinsey & Company estimated the percentage as 90 percent when measured by power consumption), most of these workers are not engaged most of the time.