If you hire a mechanical turk, you are going to get buttons pushed.
If you hire a contractor, you are going to get billable hours.
If you hire an employee, you are going to get a butt in a chair.
If you hire a consultant, you are going to get a report.
If you hire an expert, you are going to get an opinion.
In none of these cases are you guaranteed to get the true enrollment of a human being. You would likely expect the the attention of a human being, but these days you might have to pay extra for that. In the case of the mechanical turk, the probability is very high that they are actually using AI to “cheat” at their “jobs”. And who can blame them? I would do the same thing.
As an exploration of the concept of enrollment, let me tell you about the time I failed to hire Don McCurdy.
I first stumbled upon Don’s work through my interest in augmented reality. He was working at Google at the time and was a major contributor to Model Viewer, as well as the three.js library that powers it. I later realized he was even contributing to the glTF specification itself, which is poised to be the JPEG of 3D models. (Any day now, you’ll see.)
While I was in the process of building polySpectra AR, I saw that Don had left Google. Between this personal announcement and noticing his developer “tip jar” on GitHub, I figured that he would be open to at least discuss the possibility of working together.*
I sent him an email. No reply. I followed up. No reply.
The funny thing was that during this time where I couldn’t get any response to my emails, Don was incredibly generous with answering lots of my programming questions that were related to the problems we were having with polySpectra AR. I quickly realized that if I was showing respect for his craft, showing I had done enough searching to attempt to solve the problem myself (or have our developers try to solve the problem themselves), and if I presented the question in the channels of Don’s choice (GitHub & Discord at the time) — then I was fairly likely to get Don to solve my problems within a day or two. Completely for free, on his own time, just for fun.
I literally could not pay this expert. I could not get him to engage in a discussion about money. I could not buy his attention. But by engaging in a real dialog in an appropriate forum, I could see that Don was clearly enrolled in the idea of helping other people solve their problems with web AR. He was particularly helpful when I asked questions about how to use the amazing library that he wrote, glTF Transform. This makes sense, it is his project, he cares deeply about it, and he is enrolled in helping other people use it.**
Don is not an outlier. This is a very common pattern I have seen with the best in the world. If you offer money, you get no reply. If you engage in a genuine dialog, you can get the best advice, from the smartest people, for free.
Money can’t buy you enrollment.
* Re-reading this, I am laughing out loud at the way this phrase slipped in: “working together”. But that’s exactly what this is all about. What does it mean to “work together”?
** It looks like Don is now experimenting with a new way to monetize his expert attention: glTF Transform Pro.