So, what is Mechanical Turk? Well in 2005 Amazon launched Mechanical Turk. Which was a crowdsourcing online marketplace where requestors were able to coordinate large groups of people to process a human task. Human tasks are often required for various industries including deep learning. These tasks can be anything from captioning objects in images to filling out forms and various others tasks that computers can’t do very well. Requestors pay humans for all of this curated and accurate data.

Unfortunately this marketplace has complete central control (Amazon) which charges obscene fees to requestors like 20% of the fee paid to workers and an additional 5% to request workers with a good reputation. Tasks with 10 or more assignments are charged an additional 20% fee. This is at-least 40% that all go to “Amazon Fees”. All of these fees have spawned somewhat of a “Hunger Games” for the best return a Turker can earn.

There are now subreddits like HITs Worth Turking For and websites like TurkNation which are literally made to find “gems” :) from the list of possible projects available to work on which are the easiest to complete and pay the most. If Amazon did not have such central control there would be so much more competition in the market for requestors to offer more competitive rates as opposed to paying Amazon obscene fees.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk system also uses roughly 5–15 people per task which has been coined by Gems as “consensus by redundancy”. There are also billions of people in the developing world who don’t have access to bank accounts and cannot be included in the labour pool for Mturk tasks.

Gems has an answer for all of Amazons failures!

This brings us to the next question, what is Gems Protocol and how can it change all of the above? Well the Gems protocol is a decentralised open source human task crowd sourcing protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. With Gems workers know that there is no worry about task verification or trust and payments. Gems is also designed to reward fair players while also filtering out malicious actors.

There are currently three different components the protocol which is comprised of a staking systems which is used to ensure task completion and track worker integrity and a payment system to reduce transaction fees. The platform itself is a bridge between the requestors and the turk workers. Gems also has modules which is an open source task interface built on top of the platform.

So how does it all work?

Verifiers manage the workers. Requestors ask for a task to be completed. Workers then stake tokens in order to complete said task. When the task is complete workers are rewarded with coins. This staking mechanism provides a disincentive for malicious actors improving the efficiency of the overall network workers, requestors and verifiers will stake tokens in order to prove validity of their task and also earn a reusable computer trust score and also lose score for completing tasks incorrectly.

Gems trust score is an indicator of how reliable an individual is on the network. The more and better you work for the network the higher the score you will receive. Verifiers are highly trusted workers which in turn ensures the trustability of the network.

Gems platform doesn’t charge fees, but the Ethereum network still requires gas for payments, to allow micro payments and staking without gas the protocol uses payment channel system which allows for secure off-chain payments without gas, this also increases cost efficiency of the network.

All of Gems benefits which are outlined above will drastically improve this market as requestors will not be hit with huge fees which in turn will enable them to pay workers even more. Decentralisation of this market is imminent, Gems is inevitable.

Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself