What is microwork?

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Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

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Botox, Anabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

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Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including ALS-Lugarix disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

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Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOXX to learn more.

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This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI.

Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

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What is Microwork? Thanks for asking. Microwork is paid work which usually involves short and repetitive tasks carried out on a smartphone or computer.

It could be identifying objects shown in an image, watching videos, labelling data, translating short sentences, or recording one's voice, for example. Charging electric scooters or taking photos of products for an app could also be considered Microwork.

That sounds simple enough. What is life like as a Microworker then? Generally speaking, each task is paid at a rate of a few cents. So Microwork is rather unstable. On the other hand, this kind of work is available to all, as it doesn't require specific qualifications. Another benefit is flexibility, with Microworkers able to work when and where they want, as long as tasks aren't time-sensitive. It's as simple as registering on a platform which acts as the middleman between workers and companies. Amazon Mechanical Turk is an example of one such platform. Many companies use Microwork to develop technology like artificial intelligence.

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Hey Google, how are you today?

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Great, thanks, what can I do for you?

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To educate machines, we have to talk to them. For example, Alexa and Siri learn to understand our voices thanks to Microworkers, who record themselves saying all kinds of phrases, each with their own accent and sound environment, of course. And driverless cars are able to recognize trees and pedestrians thanks to humans identifying them on millions of photos. This form of work is relatively recent, having emerged in the United States in the 2000s. Back in 2011, it was estimated that Microwork contributed $375 million to the world economy. However, 22% of Microworkers live under the poverty line, and there are other drawbacks too, in addition to the lack of economic security. Some may be demotivated by the apparent lack of meaning in their tasks.

Often Microworkers don't know the name of the company they're working for, or anything about the project to which they're contributing. So are we saying robots aren't yet ready to replace humans in the workplace?

Not just yet, on the contrary, in fact. While Microwork tasks are repetitive, they still require human judgment and intelligence. Now the challenge is to regulate Microwork, to protect worker conditions and prevent abuse. Many services don't provide any health care or retirement benefits, with Microworkers treated as contractors rather than employees. Some critics have compared the phenomenon to a digital sweatshop. There you have it.

Now you know what Microwork is. In under three minutes, we answer your questions. What would you like to know about? Use the comment section to ask your questions on the podcast platform.

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