THIS STARTUP IS CHALLENGING MECHANICAL TURK—ON THE BLOCKCHAIN Posted on : Feb 23 - 2018

THE PROMISE OF the gig economy—that it would empower workers to be their own bosses, liberate them from tyrannical office culture, and let creative types chase their dreams while maintaining a side hustle—is wearing thin. On-demand startups like Uber and Postmates have spawned countless lawsuits from workers claiming they’ve been misclassified and underpaid, while platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk have become infamous for pocketing 20 percent fees on microtasks that pay an average wage of $2 per hour. Now, two entrepreneurial brothers think they can rehabilitate a corner of the gig economy with blockchain technology—and they’ve just raised just over $60 million to do so.

Gems is the brainchild of Rory and Kieran O’Reilly, brothers who dropped out of Harvard in 2014 to cofound gifs.com and soon found themselves under the tutelage of the Thiel Fellowship. Their ambitious mission to challenge Mechanical Turk might stand a chance: Crowdwork, in which tens of thousands of workers clean data, train AI, and moderate online content for notoriously little pay, is ripe for disruption. Gems has attracted a fair amount of buzz, including a 45,000-person Telegram chat group, plus help from big-name advisers such as Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and Recaptcha cofounder Ben Maurer. It’s also earned the support of some 350 Facebook, Google, and Apple employees, who banded together to contribute about $1.2 million to the recent funding through an initial coin offering, alongside investors like Pantera Capital and Alphacoin Fund. But for Gems to succeed, it will need to inspire the people and companies farming out tasks to move their business to the blockchain—and convince crowdworkers that it’s time to trust their livelihoods to the volatile world of cryptocurrency.

That won’t be easy. The O’Reillys are paying some companies—including The Q, an HQ trivia competitor—to place tasks on their site. But it won’t be able to sponsor an artificial supply of work for long: Gems isn’t designed to be profitable; ultimately, it aims to be self-sustaining. For those early requesters to stick around once Gems’ sponsorship runs out, Gems will need a ready and willing workforce. And working on the Gems platform requires first purchasing Gems tokens—a barrier to entry for the financially strapped workers who often turn to microtasks.

Gems isn’t the first attempt to dislodge Mechanical Turk: Amazon has long faced competition from Crowdflower, another commercial microtask platform; it’s also seen challengers from academia, such as Daemo and Prolific, and other blockchain-based initiatives, such as Storm Market and Coinworker. To date, Mechanical Turk has stubbornly remained the Xerox of crowdwork. View More