I think I have to blame Seth Godin for revealing the existence of Mechanical Turk to me.  Or Jeff Bezos for letting it happen in the first place.  At any rate, Mechanic Turk exists and it’s a fascinating and occasionally repulsive thing.

The original Mechanical Turk was a scam:  around 100 years ago, people thought they were playing chess against a dumb machine.  As it turns out, the “machine” was actually controlled by a human being, but the other players didn’t know that.

By contrast, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a website that’s a staggering example of crowdsourcing and the atomization of work into commodity pieces.  You use the website to request work to be done and, behind the scenes, it’s separated into small chunks that can be worked upon by individuals for extremely cheap rates.

There’s a lot of work that’s out there that pays less than $0.10 per piece.  It’s hard to tell for sure, but my best guess is that if there’s 100000 pieces of work out there at any one time, at least 40% of them pay less than $0.10 per piece.

This is yet another step in outsourcing and business services, but it’s democratized to the point that anyone with Web access and a credit card can take big jobs and get them done by the equivalent of worker bees.  The most common work items (or Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) as they are called) are things like:

• image tagging
• simple data entry
• audio transcription
• language translation
• article/blog post/content writing
• off site SEO/SMM stuff used to get more hits on people’s websites
• questionnaires and quizzes

Not to be rude, but there’s a lot more crap out there than I thought there would be.  For example, one job that I stumbled across was indexing X-rated (or worse) computer games.  I guess I shouldn’t (and don’t) think that a commercial site like Mechanical Turk would be an inspiring bastion of group effort, but it feels more like the scummier parts of Craiglist (no offense to Newmark’s baby, it’s just how it has evolved in places) or some sleazy non-descript webpage trafficking in useless crap than it feels like SETI@home or Project Guttenberg.

But here’s the really disgusting thing about Mechanical Turk:

It’s addictive.

Y0u try one or two of these silly jobs and after awhile you notice something.  Even though some of the jobs only pay $0.01 each, you can do some of them in 5 seconds or less with 3 – 5 clicks of the mouse.  Suddenly, being paid a $0.01 piece rate doesn’t seem so bad when you can string together about 500 of them and click mindlessly while watching TV or something.

Some of the work is kind of cool:  I found a fun psychological experiment where I had to share some money with an anonymous partner that might be paid to us as a bonus above and beyond the piece rate.  And so, there are fun little gems and nuggets sprinkled within, so the Mechanical Turk becomes a sort of serendipity engine which is 99.99% crap and 0.01% fun.  It becomes a game.

Meanwhile, you slowly earn enough money to buy 2-3 books from Amazon.com… that’s the other addictive part.  As soon as you amass some significant money (say $5.00 or more), well, now you’re on the path to making $40.00 or $50.00 so you can buy your books and take advantage of free shipping.  And so on.

Mechanical Turk is just a website with a crowdsourcing engine.  It’s not inherently evil, I guess, as long as your job isn’t being consumed by this crowdsourcing application:  then it would suck, I suppose.  The most interesting thing is how people will flock to it in ways to either make money or save money.

There must be a point to this story; I’m just not sure what it is.  I hope we don’t find out while we in line at the dole, though.  Or trying to get into the shelter after eating at the soup kitchen.

Image by robertstinnett

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is CrowdFlower the Future of Work? (technoverseblog.com)
• Any sites similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk? (startups.com)
• The Ethics of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (profhacker.com)
• Using Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” for user research (jonoscript.wordpress.com)
• Mechanical Turk (wins every time) (snarkmarket.com)
• Make Extra Cash During Your Zen Time With Amazon Mechanical Turk (makeuseof.com)
• PHOTO: Sortfolio uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (37signals.com)