The Mechanical Turk: Amazon.com's New Service

About a year ago Amazon.com released a service known as the mechanical turk. This service was based upon an ingenious idea that a 19^th century inventor had. Why not hide human brainpower within a "robotic" design.

The original Mechanical Turk was made out to be a so called chess playing "robot", in reality it was nothing more than a very fancy suit meant to hide a human. Kings were amazed at the inventor's ingenuity, and quickly praised his amazing scientific work. Later it became known that this amazing act of science was nothing more than a scam.

Unlike its 19^th century predecessor amazon.com's a mechanical turk is anything but a scam. The Mechanical Turk service allows businesses or just plain old people to give human beings tasks that computers cannot easily accomplish in exchange for an often very small reward. This reward generally varies from one cent to a couple of dollars, with the majority of the tasks being on the lower end of the scale.

If you have tasks that computers cannot easily accomplish then this service is amazing. It allows you to meld the processing power of a computer with the audio visual power of a human being. The highest paying task on the mechanical turk service is audio transcription. People can make a decent dollar if they want to listen to short audio recordings and convert them to text. This seems like a great idea until you realize that the average rate the mechanical turk program is paying isn't even minimum wage.

Critics have likened this program to a digital sweatshop that takes advantage of stay at home moms and other people in similar situations. Whereas advocates counter, by saying that the mechanical turk workers (or "Turkers", as they prefer to be called) are mostly middle class.

If you are a worker payment will normally be credited directly to your mTurk account. From that point you can move the money to a bank account or an Amazon.com gift certificate.

If you wish to post a "human intelligence task" or H.I.T. there are a number of options available to you. Amazon.com has released a command line tool that makes it very easy to upload and create a large number of tasks. Moreover, Amazon has created a software development kit that allows developers to make software "calls" directly to human beings using premade methods.

How does Amazon.com profit from this interesting new service? Very simple, when someone goes to make a H.I.T. they pay an additional 10% of the wage they would pay the worker to Amazon. This profit looks to be quite successful, and has already revolutionized more than one industry