The Force Awakens: I got to test the Effect.ai first phase beta
All right! More news on Effect.ai and it seems it is going indeed to where I would love to see it go: providing a minimum FAIR wage for people worldwide. For those who want to read my introduction on Effect.ai, check out my previous article on this amazing project right here.
Before I dive into the overview of Effect Force, I want to quickly cover the exciting current news with Effect.ai. The team is in the process of migrating all of their developments and their token (EFX) from the NEO blockchain to the EOS blockchain. NEO was painted to be the “Chinese Ethereum” in 2017 and supposed to be the next big thing but has yet to deliver on a lot of their promises and forced their number one dapp — Effect.ai to find an alternative more suitable platform. Effect.ai calls itself “blockchain agnostic”, which is a healthy point of view for a project to succeed. Effect.AI’s smart contract was grinding the NEO network to a halt which made it very clear that NEO does not have what it needs to be the home of Effect.AI.
Effect.AI has started a seriously impressive partnership with the United Nations and has just completed their first pilot program in the country of Georgia — a beautiful nation plagued with high unemployment rates for many impoverished citizens and graduates alike. Effect.AI’s first phase and platform, called Effect Force, is providing a means to stay enrolled, make a living and learn all at the same time. This is a double effective means to help people further in life, as well as prevent them from taking the wrong road. Effect.AI is hoping to start similar initiatives in developing nations around the world. This is something that the world needs and is far more effective than charity, which is mostly a short term solution anyways. People need to participate and feel they belong in the community as valuable members.
Growing up in not the nicest of neighbourhoods and having seen the implications up close of people stuck and not being able to work for a living — I have seen the damage it does to society and even close relatives. People turning to stimulants to get by or turning to crime to provide for themselves and family. This is a downward spiral that can drag an entire generation down, even in a mostly nice and quaint country like the Netherlands.
Next, to my life as a young adult in the Netherlands with all the characteristics and privileges of the developed world, I had the pleasure of living and working for an entire year in Nepal. I found a job as a Hotel Manager, earning myself a whopping salary of $250 a month(25,000 NPR). I was a tourist, painted with monks, drank a lot of Tongba (my favourite drink) and I have been there to the hospital for an early phase of kidney stones. The bill was about 4,000 NPR ($40). And this was just the medical teaching hospital in Pokhara. Not some fancy private hospital or anything remotely special. Might not be much to western standards, but it is literally the difference for a lot of Nepali’s between life and death (Tuberculosis is for some people too expensive to treat). I know this because I have worked with people who slaved away 16 hours a day, 14 days in a row, take 3–4 days off and repeated that dreaded cycle for as little as $50. That’s less than $2 per day for some really long working hours! The strugles are real and we need to come together to find and build more solutions to address our brothers and sisters around the globe.
Back to Effect Force — I had the opportunity to test the beta version of the platform for myself! Effect Force is the platform for people to train algorithms necessary for the development of Artificial Intelligence. The Force will has a variety of micro-tasks to complete and are almost always very simple. One of the tasks I able to take part in was data extraction. Of course before I get to work I start with my morning cup of french pressed coffee and got to work. The task instructions are easy to understand and with this particular work it netted 11 EFX per task.
The task was quite simple, following the instructions I needed to open a link to a website, on this website certain information needed to be extracted and then filled in a form. It was about investments. Date of investment. The amount invested, in which currency, the party/firm who made the round and to which company was the beneficiary of the funding. being. In one hour I was able to do 24 tasks, for a grand total of 264 EFX. That’s $1,85 for one hour of doing non-labour intensive work.
Can’t personally quit my day job to do that, but as mentioned above, it can make a huge impact on the lives of many others on this planet. Also these are tasks for the beta version of the platform. Effect.AI is committed to raise the hourly rate to a minimum of $4.00.
Let’s take a look at where Effect Force can truly change the lives of people for the better. The other day I came to across Venezuelan Runescape Gold farming miners. As we all know, the Venezuelan situation is dire and the economy has collapsed. The average wage was $6.70 a month last January after Maduro raised it by 300%! This resulted in Venezualans having to resort to farming (killing over and over for rewards) Green Dragons in this massive MMORPG (a collective online videogame) to grind items that they are able to sell for virtual in-game currency. This in-game gold is externally sold for Bitcoin. To make matters worse. These Green Dragons are located in a PvP-area (Player versus Player) so these Venezuelan digital farmers are under constant threat of getting killed in that videogame. They also receive a lot of hate from other players (read — privileged teenagers from developed countries). The entire ordeal of repeating this endless grind and the danger of illegal selling of the digital gold (players get their accounts permabanned) will eventually get them about $0.50
So you can see, about 90 minutes of doing these micro-tasks on the Effect Force platform netted more than a month’s salary for these Venezuelans.
Other tasks I got to try to include the qualifications tasks for transcribing audio and data labelling. This meant transcribing audio files in the language you signed up for. The Dutch transcribing of audio were clips from radio news reporting. The English were fragments of interviews with people about automation and what they think would be the impact of Artificial Intelligence. These were rather interesting and far from boring.
The data labelling is reminiscent of the dreadful Recaptcha we all get to do before finally being able to log in to our accounts across the internet, but not as mind dulling and far more precise. You have to recognize an object and in this case not just click on the pictures but to annotate the object itself.
Above is the actual screen you see when doing these tasks. Up the bar with your reputation (so you can do certain tasks that require more dedication), your profile with basic information as well as your extractable private keys. Notification speaks for itself and the task overview is where you can see the available tasks.
More tasks will come when Force is released, but we can see what Force has in mind already:
Face recognition and image classification are two more types of tasks, but I am sure more will follow.
For some people who will do this for 8 hours a day, like most jobs, doing the tasks might become a bit tedious and boring, so Effect.ai started gamification of the tasks. In the future, workers can share their profile and compete with each other in a monthly leaderboard, earn badges and achievement points.
Chris Dawe, the Project’s CEO hinted thousands, if not millions of tasks will be available on the platform and FORCE API is coming, so people and dapps can interact with the available tasks as well (will help a lot for the future phases of this project and other dapps in the EOS ecosystem).
from the Telegram channel;
[Forwarded from Chris | Effect.AI]
Most of the marketplaces do not offer data structuring/annotation. With the Effect Force API, we imagine many of these marketplaces will feature us as the or one of the solution providers. We have talked with Microsoft, KPN, and IBM in the last couple of months to understand their requirements to list Effect Force as a service provider partner. Just some of the places we will see decentralized products like Effect Force.
As we now know, the project is in the process of the exodus from NEO to EOS. This means the NEP-5 token EFX will be swapped for an EOSIO.token standard. Users will need an EOS account for this, which isn’t too hard to set up but requires a few dollars to stake some EOS for RAM at the moment. LiquidDapps is coming up, and if implemented the way it supposed to be, free accounts for Force workers are in the stars. More on this in April.
Great things coming up for Effect.ai in 2019 and glad to have found this interesting projects that can bring balance to the distribution of wealth around this globe. I will certainly cover more about this project in the future.
Website: https://effect.ai
Force: https://beta.effect.ai
Github: https://github.com/effectai
Telegram: https://t.me/effectai
Twitter: https://twitter.com/effectaix
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/effectai/
Medium: https://medium.com/@effectai
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/effectai
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effectai/
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2737469.0