In order to fully grasp the importance of this project one must possess a clear understanding of that HITs are as well as what the MTurk is. The former, an abbreviation for Human Intelligence Tasks, are tasks that require human intelligence, e.g. tagging pictures with specific imagery on them, moderating video content, filling out questionnaires and so on; the latter is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — a service that allows companies to outsource their human inteligence tasks.
So what’s so wrong with that service that would inspire the Gems’s team to come up with a decentralized blockchain alternative? Turns out the answer is a lot…
MTurk’s employees have to spent high amounts of time on tasks that sometimes have already been performed by some of their employees. This is because Amazon has to ensure the initial solution is the proper one and it is 100% correct. Moreover, employees are never payed per task and most of them end up with below minimum wages per hour. Signing up as a worker on MTurk is a long and tedius process too, not to mention that not having a bank account immediately makes you ineligible for the job (fun fact — about 35–38% of the world population does NOT own a bank account).
Companies that want to work with Amazon are also going through a lot of financial trouble to ensure their HITs are being taken care of. Sometimes as much as 40% of the price for handling the tasks goes directly to MTurk. Furthermore, Amazon’s main competitor on the market — CrowdFlower — is also charging fees as high as $3000 for on boarding and up to $1500 per month. In addition, those number can rise up with additional 15% based on employee fees.
This is where Gems come in — a protocol that is built on top of the well known Etherium blockchain, which will allow people to complete micro tasks without the need of a middleman. Gems is split in 3 levels:
- The Gems protocol itself: it will allow DApps to be built on top of it in and essentially assess the validity of work and trust of the networks future participants.
- The Gems platform: the place where the magic will be happening — companies with HITs will be paired with eligible workers that will complete their micro tasks.
- Modules: reusable open-source task interfaces that will enable efficient micro task creation for requesters and completion for workers.
You can pretty much see how revolutionary this project is in terms of its MPV. Implementing staking and trust scoring mechanisms will make the current economically inefficient model employed by MTurk a thing of the past. Workers will no longer have to reconfirm tasks done by others and instead will focus their time on task that are yet to be completed. And the best news is that they will finally be able to get a reward proportional to the complexity of the micro-task they are trying to take care of. In addition, as everything crypto related, the need for an old-school bank account is eliminated, meaning every computer literate worker with an internet connection can become part of Gems. Oh, and let’s not forget how profitable such a switch will be for companies which will no longer have to over-pay for the services of the monopolist on the market
The Gems team… This is the part where you might have to lower your screen brightness for what’s about to follow will shine!
Rory and Kieran O’Reilly are Harvard dropouts, both in their early twenties and both already recognized by the prestigious Forbes list “30 under 30”. While still at Harvard, Rory was named among the 19 “most impressive” students. Later on Rory and Kieran started gifs.com where they took the CEO and CTO positions respectively. And last but not least, both of them are Thiel Fellows (participants in the “The Thiel Fellowship” — a special program for bright school dropouts that opted to start their own thing).
And now, time for the cherry that comes on top … subtle drum roll …
Biz Stone ladies and gentlemen!
Biz is listed as the lead advisor on the project and I can rest assured that young Rory and Kieran are in good hand when it comes to the challenges they are about to face with their project. Having co-founded both Twitter and Medium, Stone is one of the most prominent and experienced social-media and tech entrepreneurs. The only real challenge in front of him is to transfer his expertise into the crypto world. Will he be able to steer Gems’ team through the wild waters of the crypto see? Only time will tell.
If you want to learn more about Gems and their team, be sure to check out this video and their social media channels listed below.