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Years ago, I read the announcement of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, and was intrigued. At the time, I was running an E-Commerce development company, and had a potential contract that would have required my employees (OK, me, I didn’t have any employees yet) to manually resize and clean up about 25,000 merchandise photos.
I looked into “MTurk” for this, it seemed obvious that it could be just the thing for such a task. Nope! the interface was terrible then, and hasn’t improved a bit since then. Not only that, I would have had to pay a listing fee, and it was not at all clear to me how I’d ensure the quality of results that my client should expect. When it became clear to me that the actual workers would be receiving only about 2/3 of what I was paying, I dropped the idea.
So, I didn’t take the project, which would have brought in quite a lot of money if I could have just coordinated the big markup task.
That was then, this is now … or soon anyway.
Enter GEMS
GEMS is a decentralized microtask solution built on blockchain, which provides a system for microtasks.
Their whitepaper has this dense summary of the point of the project:
The Gems Network facilitates the extension and efficient operation of the micro task community by allowing organizations to reliably deploy micro task miners. The Gems Protocol, through validating task completions with the Gems Staking mechanism and enabling miners to have a reusable trust mechanism through the Gems Trust Score, enforces compliance of network participants. The Gems Protocol enables the creation of various platforms that are built on top of the Gems Protocol. Platforms that are created have no intrinsic fee imposed by the Gems Protocol, broaden the scope of the labor supply, and eliminate inefficiencies in the market place. Gems allows any application to utilize efficient online scalable workforces.
Let me unpack that a bit for you.
First, when they talk about “miners”, they mean the folks who actually carry out the micro-tasks. The GEMS protocol is cleverly set up to appeal to the many millions of people in the world who have access to internet, but not to banking. By itself, that feature will vastly expand the number of people interested in being part of that labor pool.
By “Staking”, they mean that the worker who submits a task completion, must also put a (usually tiny) portion of the contract payment into escrow as a “stake”. If their work is rejected by the verification step, they lose their stake. This gives a game theory enforced incentive for honesty.
The Gems Trust Score is the score given to each worker, based on their platform history. They’ve got a ton of math and graphs in the whitepaper explaining how it will work. However, my tl;dr version is “It will be difficult to build a high trust score quickly, to make it harder to spam junk work.”
By “Platforms”, they mean basically plug-in modules that work for various types of micro-tasks. The first such platform will be one for labeling data needed to train AI systems. I envision many more, such as translations, app testing, UI testing and surveys.
By making this part of their system modular, I think that the GEMS creators are trying to truly keep things decentralized, all the way to the core. It’s a great sign.
Conclusion
It’s an exciting project. I will be participating in the upcoming ICO, but more importantly, I will be waiting to use the system as it matures.
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