Having documented ad nauseum that 85% of the computers sold to Africa are reused and repaired, and documenting that the 3B3K market (3 billion people earning $3k per year) has added internet access at 10 times the rate of growth of the "developed world", how do we create employment without outsourcing a job?
We outsource work done by an overheated machine.... IBM's Big Blue, perhaps. It's "immaculate exploitation", no jobs exported, no toxics, creating jobs out of code.
This AWESOME article from MIT Press (found on /.), Human Workers Managed by an Algorithm, explains how human interaction is more efficient for certain mega-computing processes.
Supercomputing is actually more efficient if some of the algorithms are done "by hand". The programs have to check off boxes which are obvious... humans can do it instinctively, and crowd-sourcing limits or eliminates subjective bias. The problem is you just cannot afford to do it in Silicon Valley, your maximum return is $4 per hour.
The bad news? Oh gee, people in "Developing Nations" earning less than minimum wage, there's gotta be a downside. Quick, let's send a reporter to photograph the dirty clothes their children wear, the mud huts, trash being burned at the Accra or Lagos landfill. Because these jobs are available to people who can only afford a $20 used CRT monitor. Yes... there's a photo of a burning computer monitor that needs to go into the article somewhere, or a "witches brew" of bad capacitors associated with the good enough market.
"Exploitation".
We outsource work done by an overheated machine.... IBM's Big Blue, perhaps. It's "immaculate exploitation", no jobs exported, no toxics, creating jobs out of code.
This AWESOME article from MIT Press (found on /.), Human Workers Managed by an Algorithm, explains how human interaction is more efficient for certain mega-computing processes.
Supercomputing is actually more efficient if some of the algorithms are done "by hand". The programs have to check off boxes which are obvious... humans can do it instinctively, and crowd-sourcing limits or eliminates subjective bias. The problem is you just cannot afford to do it in Silicon Valley, your maximum return is $4 per hour.
By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings."Four bucks per hour is great for MOST people in the world. Awesome, in fact. And they are not taking jobs away from Big Blue, they just give the megacomputers more "leisure time" (if you are stuck in the thinking of Marx, Hegel and John Stuart Mill).
The bad news? Oh gee, people in "Developing Nations" earning less than minimum wage, there's gotta be a downside. Quick, let's send a reporter to photograph the dirty clothes their children wear, the mud huts, trash being burned at the Accra or Lagos landfill. Because these jobs are available to people who can only afford a $20 used CRT monitor. Yes... there's a photo of a burning computer monitor that needs to go into the article somewhere, or a "witches brew" of bad capacitors associated with the good enough market.
"Exploitation".
