Authors:
Lilly Irani, Six Silberman
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) works by keeping worlds apart. AMT is a Web-based labor market that draws workers from all over the world to perform small bits of digital labor for pay—frequently for as low as a few dollars an hour. Amazon's engineers and managers designed AMT to make up for the failure of artificial intelligence to fully automate their data-processing tasks. Unable to replace low-status workers with machines, Amazon simulated machines with hidden, globally distributed, contingent, low-status workers. From outside, the technologists and researchers who work "through" AMT see it as a smoothly functioning infrastructure. AMT organizes workers…
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