The rise of the gig economy has presented a myriad of challenges for organized labor.
Most gig economy firms, including virtually all crowd-worker platforms, classify their workers as contractors, which means that they do not qualify for benefits, minimum wage, or overtime. The sites pay as little as $1 per hour.
At Google . . an open rebellion broke out over one - Project Maven. Several employees quit Google in protest, while others openly challenged the Silicon Valley giant’s leadership, claiming that the company had abandoned its “Don’t Be Evil” ethos. Employees demanded that the company swear off future “warfare technology” projects.
Executives were later caught misleading workers, erroneously stating that the contract was merely worth $9 million, while internal documents revealed that Google expected Project Maven to ramp up to a $250 million contract.
The distributed network allows for a global workforce. Figure Eight has a large user base in countries such as Venezuela, Indonesia, and Russia, as well as the United States. The far-flung employee base and individualized tasks on an opaque platform provide few opportunities for questioning corporate decisions.
One from The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/04
Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project
"Millions of gig economy workers around the world now earn a living on so-called crowd worker websites — work that falls under the umbrella of crowdsourcing, or dividing up tasks into minuscule portions to spread over a large number of people. 
Some of these crowd workers were unknowingly helping to build out the Pentagon’s battlefield drone capability.
Several Figure Eight workers told The Intercept that it is not out of the ordinary for workers to be left in the dark about how their assembly-line style of data entry is used.
The work was done as part of a Defense Department initiative called Project Maven. Last year, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon had quietly tapped Google as part of the project to develop an artificial intelligence program to help Air Force analysts swiftly sort the thousands of hours of drone video and choose targets on the battlefield. . . "
Since 2007 Figure Eight has hosted one of the largest digital platforms that allows individuals to sign up to perform micro-tasks, such as data annotation. The “human-in-the-loop” service is marketed as a cost-effective way for companies to fine-tune large data sets to make algorithms more accurate. Other firms in the industry include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Upwork, and Clickworker.
workers performing the data labeling, known as “contributors,” did not know that they were working for Google or for the military, which is not an unusual arrangement. _______________________________________________________________
"According to a new report from The Intercept, Google hired gig economy workers to help build out a controversial artificial intelligence program that the company had paired with the Pentagon to build.
The workers were hired through a crowdsourcing gig company outfit called Figure Eight, which pays as little at $1 an hour for people to perform short, seemingly mindless tasks.
Project Maven is a Pentagon project intended to use machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to differentiate people and objects in thousands of hours of drone footage. By employing these crowd-sourced microworkers, Google was able to use them to teach the algorithms it was running how to distinguish between human targets and surrounding objects.
According to The Intercept, these workers had no idea who their work was benefitting or what they were building.
Figure Eight, which was previously known as Crowdflower, is one of the largest platforms that employs microworkers. On its website, Figure Eight says its platform “combines human intelligence at scale with cutting-edge models to create the highest quality training data for your machine learning (ML) projects.” By partnering with these microworker outfits, Google could quickly and cheaply build out its AI. _________________________________________________________________________
Google AI and Machine Learning with Dr. Karina Montilla Edmonds on MIND & MACHINE
