Daily Iteration

Yesterday I took a closer look at Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. This is a service where developers can request tasks to be carried out by humans, and get the result in what looks like a common RPC, so one can plug it straight into your code. Sounds a little unclear, right? Let me quote from their FAQ:

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}

How it works in practice: you sign up to the service with your regular Amazon account, and you get presented a list of “HITs”, or Human Intelligence Tasks. These are typically things like spotting elements in images (such as lampposts in aerial views), or transcribing short fragments of audio, or completing online surveys. Some “smart” guys, however, have created requests for writing short posts for their blogs, and there was one requesting you to write a positive review for some website in your blog, mentioning specific sentences and posting links back to them - crystal clear search engine fraud. I flagged this one as inappropriate last night, and today it is still there. For each of these tasks, you get paid small amounts of cash, which vary from five cents to two dollars.
Now, the question I asked myself when I was taking a look at the site: is this a great idea, or is it a new form of digital labor sweatshops, where thousands of people will toil away all day long performing small tasks for petty cash? The HITs pay very little - I got paid 12 cents for completing a demographics survey and five cents for a survey regarding some new web service, and it took me about 10 minutes to do both, which would scale up to around US$1 for one hour of work. For US or European residents this might be very low, but there are plenty of occupations around the world which pay less than this, so if I was an unskilled worker in a developing country (oh wait, I’m almost there ) this might be tempting. But then again, I guess unskilled workers in developing countries with easy, long-term access to a computer and internet connection and who speak English are few and far between. If I was a kid, I would certainly prefer spending an hour clicking on lampposts in aerial photographs than sweating over a lawnmower at the neighbor’s garden to make a dollar - but then, according to Amazon’s TOS, you have to be over 18 to participate.
Is this an ingenious solution to solving tasks computers are bad at, or is it a new, 21st century form of exploitation?