Amazon's Mechanical Turk

The Turk was an eighteenth century chess playing machine that beat, among other notables, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The machine was, of course, a hoax based on having a human hidden inside the apparatus directing the machine.
Amazon has taken the name, and the concept, for its new artificial intelligence engine Mechanical Turk.

There are some tasks which people are much better at solving than computers (even still). The concept of MTurk is that people submit requests called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) like "does this picture contain a duck" or "what color is this shoe" and offer a small fee on the order of $.03 for a valid answer. Turkers accept the job and submit the answer. The same job will be taken and fulfilled by more than one person and, if the answers match, the answer is deemed correct and the people are paid. The payment amounts are so small that it's not really a way to make a living - most people doing it are participating instead of playing solitaire or some other mindless game and are thrilled to make $50 in a week.

This article was posted in the SBM forum of Moodle and is an excellent review and commentary on Amazon's newest scheme.