• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site,

and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but

requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like

the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the

work.

For example, John Jantsch took an interview he did with me (about forty minutes of

audio) and posted it to a site that uses the Turk as its labor. For just a few dollars, the site

took the recording, chopped it into tiny bits, and parceled it out to anonymous laborers

who each transcribed their little section. Less than three hours later, it was sewn back

together and the typed transcript was delivered to John.

Instead of paying the industry rate of two dollars a minute (about eighty dollars), services

like CastingWords do transcription for less than fifty cents a minute using the Turk. They

pay their workers (all of whom speak English, know how to type, and have a computer

with an Internet connection) about nineteen cents for each minute transcribed. I figure

that's about two dollars an hour when you calculate all their labor. And there's no

shortage of transcribers. An eighty-dollar project becomes a fifteen-dollar project when

you process it with the Mechanical Turk. That's a 70 percent decrease in cost and a vast

increase in speed.

The Internet has turned white-collar work into something akin to building a pyramid in

Egypt. No one could build the entire thing, but anyone can haul one brick into place.

Here's the scary part: some bosses want their employees (you?) to become the next

Mechanical Turk. Is that your dream job?

(The Pursuit of Interchangeability)

In 1765, a French general, Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval, started us down the endless path

toward interchangeable parts. He demonstrated that if the French military possessed

muskets with parts that could work from one gun to the other, the cost of repairing and

even making the guns would drop.

Until then the parts in every device, machine, and weapon were hand fitted together. A

screw did not fit any nut but only the one it was made for, a gun trigger would not slot

into any other trigger holder but the one it came with, and the barrel would not fit into

any other stock except the one it was fitted for. Essentially, every gun was custom made

and assembled.

Thomas Jefferson encountered Gribeauval and his acolyte Honore Blanc in Paris and

lobbied hard to bring their ideas back to the United States. When Eli Whitney got an

order to produce ten thousand guns for the federal government, a big part of the project

was figuring out how to make the parts interchangeable.

For decades, armorers in the Northeast struggled at great cost to develop the technology

to produce standardized parts for guns. Other industries were slow to come around. As

late as 1885, Singer sewing machines, perhaps the most sophisticated device made in the

United States in quantity, were essentially custom-made, each one unable to work with

parts from the other.

Henry Ford changed all this. His development (and promotion) of mass production meant

that cars could be made in huge quantities and at very low cost. Capitalism had found its

holy grail. Within two years of the launch of the Ford System, the productivity at some

Ford plants had increased by 400 percent or more.

The essence of mass production is that every part is interchangeable. Time, space, men,

motion, money, and material--each was made more efficient because every piece was

predictable and separate. Ford's discipline was to avoid short-term gains in exchange for

always seeking the interchangeable, always standardizing.

It only follows, then, that as you eliminate the skilled worker, the finisher, the custompart maker, then you also save money on wages as you build a company that's easy to

scale. In other words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have

interchangeable