"How many people live on less than a dollar a day? Imagine if they could earn quadruple that, just by performing menial tasks on a computer for a few hours."
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com quoted above, has created a monstrosity: Amazon Mechanical Turk, a Web site launched in November 2005 that pays people pennies to perform very simple online tasks that are difficult to automate or computerize, like identifying the color of objects in a photo or answering trivia questions.
The name Mechanical Turk comes from an 18th-century hoax perpetrated by a man named Wolfgang von Kempelen. A supposed chess-playing automaton called "The Turk" began to tour Europe, winning a number of high-profile matches. Audiences were amazed, until the Turk turned out not to be an automaton at all: like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a chess master hid in a special compartment, controlling its operations.
Likewise, the Mechanical Turk Web service today performs the tasks of a machine through human hands. Companies or individuals can use the Web service as an online market to outsource rote labor. Let's say you want to write a traveler's guide to Chicago but aren't familiar with the restaurant scene. You could post a task on Mechanical Turk, asking "Turkers" (random workers in cyberspace) to name the city's top 10 restaurants in exchange for a symbolic wage, say three cents. You could even post the same task 100 times, and get a thorough survey for a grand total of three dollars (plus a small commission paid to Amazon). If a "turker" doesn't perform the job properly or if you aren't satisfied with their work, you don't have to pay them. It's all part of the Mechanical Turk contract.
Anybody can register and start performing tasks, but it's impossible to earn a living on the service. Today, as I browse the postings, I see a lucrative opportunity: someone seeking an English-to-Italian translation is offering $10, although the translation has to be completed within 60 minutes. For Mechanical Turk, that's an amazing wage. Usually, with a few hours' work, you can't earn more than a few dollars.
The idea implicit in Mechanical Turk is that our excess time, normally reserved for inanity, can be made productive. The shirking corporate employee who spends half his workday wasting time on the computer can contribute to the economy, rather than playing java games. The bored stay-at-home parent can make a few extra bucks while sitting at the computer.
The world may not be quite ready for this particular revolution. In fact, the system has already run into its first major problem: there are now too many people offering nearly free labor, and too few people posting tasks to keep them all busy. The efficacy of Mechanical Turk's paltry incentives should be rather aggravating to people who object to the incentive assumptions of the classical economic model. Mechanical Turk is Karl Marx's worst nightmare and Adam Smith's wet dream.
Some in the blogosphere and elsewhere have pointed out that Mechanical Turk provides employers a way to circumvent minimum wage laws. This is true, but at the same time, Mechanical Turk isn't intended to be a serious source of income. I don't think real issues will arise until services like Mechanical Turk start brokering skilled labor for more significant sums.
The concept behind Mechanical Turk is what's truly fascinating about it. Division of labor has been taken to a whole new level, and the possibilities seem endless. For very little money, posters can get "Turkers" to do just about anything. With proper regulation, Mechanical Turk could become the seedling of a hyper-flexible, online marketplace for skilled and unskilled labor, operating at near-perfect efficiency. If it eventually could be used for legal advice or other types of expensive consultation, experts could make hundreds of dollars per hour, and people could benefit from their expertise at much lower rates than normal.
This is the point where my imagination descends completely into science-fiction-induced overstimulation. I could see the 'Mechanical Turk' marketplace replacing many employees.
However, I could also imagine it leading to unprecedented advances in poverty relief. How many people live on less than a dollar a day? Imagine if they could earn quadruple that, just by performing menial tasks on a computer for a few hours.
Matt Prewitt '08 had this column written by someone in Micronesia for $0.02.
