Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages

Abstract

In November 2005, Amazon Web Services started a web-based labor market where workers from across the world can choose and complete human intelligence tasks (HITS) designed by corporate developers. Labor required for fulfilling HITS varies: finding and matching information and images, translating text, transcribing audio, tagging images, answering surveys or visiting a blog. The amount of pay for each HIT ranges from one cent to several US dollars.