Jonathan Zittrain: "Minds for Sale"

A new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable over the cloud as additional server rackspace. Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, dives into the ethics and issues surrounding cloud labor in this talk from the Berkman West reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on November 18, 2009.

INDEX
0:00 Open
1:47 West Coast vs East Coast
2:05 Ubiquitous Human Computing or "Minds for Sale"
2:32 The Tween Bot
4:14 Crowdsourcing "The Future of the Internet"
7:36 A tour of the Ubiquitous Human Computing pyramid
8:37 Example 1: The X-Prize
10:24 Example 2: Innocentive
12:08 Example 3: LiveOps
15:43 Example 4: SamaSource
16:16 Example 5: Amazon's Mechanical Turk
20:13 Example 6: The ESP Game
22:47 Example 7: Human Computing for Electronic Design Automation
24:01 Example 8: Google
25:24 Why Should We be Pessimistic?
26:38 Child Labor on PBS
28:11 Laboring for a Devious Cause
29:23 US Border Webcams
30:05 Smart Drive
30:45 Internet Eyes
32:09 Identifying Protesters
33:21 A Speculative Example
35:05 Mechanical Turking your way to a Fake Reputation
39:36 Mechanical Turking your way to a Political Movement
41:20 Captchas Sweatshops
43:03 "Crowding Out"
44:41 The Future of Crowdsourcing and How to Stop It
47:14 Clickworkers of the World Unite!
50:45 Monetizing Kindness
52:25 Q&As

Category:

Education

Tags:

• jonathan
• zittrain
• Computer
• history
• museum
• berkman
• center
• harvard
• university
• stanford
• amazon
• mechanical
• turk

[rahidelvi]

Jonathan Zittrain is an excellent speaker. I found this lecture and discussion very informative. Thanks for posting.

[primesoftnz]

Should be on TED Best of the Web

[DirkMantooth]

I signed up for Mechanical Turk while watching this. lol

[zakten11]

Crowdsourcing is being done for video advertising/marketing. The results are interesting. Check out some winning videos form a crowdsourcing contest @ crowdsourcing123 .

[Nix7c0]

I am legally obligated to inform you that I may or may not have been paid $0.01 to upvote this video.

[tbsla13]

I couldn't stop laughing while "Turking" ... he is so true!

[Martialman101]

Blackberry, I don't know where you get off flaunting inequality, but in my experience it is exactly this behavior that alienates minorities. By playing the race card so frequently, especially where it is unwarranted, you are drawing larger divide between races.

that being said, the "pasty people" comment had to do with exposure to the sun, nothing else. You obviously have an issue with Ivy League education. I'm willing to bet you got rejected from Harvard.

[Wizartar]

This is amazing!!

[jimmyexx]

this lecture is excellent!

I just went to the scene to take a look,

the idea is thrilled....

fantastic speech

[firstdarkdrama]

The only off-the-cuff remark you're protesting is a single term within the context of a lecture about the Internet. No, it's absurd to say you can learn "volumes about a person's intentions and worldview" based upon one interpretation of a single off the cuff remark. And are you seriously implying that he *intentionally* used that term to reinforce outsider status in "non-whites"? You go on to make a sweeping generalization about how "white people insist on being called white." Utter hypocrisy.

[blackberryjuice1]

Off-the-cuff remarks speak volumes about a person's intentions and worldview. Also, psychological studies demonstrate that racial microaggressions psychologically and physically harm non-whites by reinforcing their outsider status in functional society. If white people are not the only people with light skin, why do white people insist on being called white? Obviously, I'm speaking to the reinforcement of racial power dynamics and how whites perpetuate race to maintain this power structure.

[firstdarkdrama]

Oh, and taking one term from the off-the-cuff beginning of an hour long speech about the Internet and implying racism is afoot isn't "reaching"? Pathetic. By the way, "white people" aren't the only ones with light skin, so you've shown at least as much 'racial insensitivity' off hand (I'd say more since, unlike him, you've explicitly made this into a race issue).