Namita Pradhan sat at a desk in downtown Bhubaneswar, India, about 40 miles from the Bay of Bengal, staring at a video recorded in a hospital on the other side of the world. The video showed the inside of someone's colon. Pradhan was looking for polyps, small growths in the large intestine that could lead to cancer. When she found one -- they look a bit like a slimy, angry pimple -- she marked it with her computer mouse and keyboard, drawing a digital circle around the tiny bulge. She was not trained as a doctor, but she was helping to teach an artificial intelligence system that could eventually do the work of a doctor. Pradhan was one of dozens of young Indian women and men lined up at desks on the fourth floor of a small office building. They were trained to annotate all kinds of digital images, pinpointing everything from stop signs and pedestrians in street scenes to factories and oil tankers in satellite photos. AI, most people in the tech industry would tell you, is the future of their industry, and it is improving fast thanks to something called machine learning. But tech executives rarely discuss the labor-intensive process that goes into its creation.

When her husband lost his factory job in 2010, Kristy Milland ran through her options. Until that point, she'd been working at home, earning extra money through odd jobs like selling collectables on eBay. She hadn't waited on tables, had no experience in fast food, and had not learned any skills that might be particularly useful in a factory. She'd once applied for a job at McDonald's, but nobody had called her for an interview. Jobs were more difficult to find in her hometown of Toronto since the beginning of the Great Recession. But there was one place where Milland knew she could get work immediately.

When Manish Bhatia began working on Amazon Mechanical Turk as a side gig in 2010, he was surprised to find himself completely fascinated by the work. Contrary to frequent coverage depicting the piece-work platform as a digital sweatshop offering low-skill tasks, he thought the microtasks were intellectually stimulating. Many involved training machine-learning algorithms to do things like make purchasing recommendations based on past behavior or categorize content by genre; Bhatia enjoyed thinking of himself as the "AI behind the AI" and knowing that he was doing something to shape the future. The only problem was that he wasn't getting paid. Miranda Katz is an associate editor at Backchannel.

Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school. According to Ipeirotis, in October 2016, American Turkers are mostly women.

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered? Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school.

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered? Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school.