Today I stumbled across something that absolutely fascinated me. I was doing a research for the Belmonster on those little images that you see on forms that verify that you're a person (incidentally, they're called "CAPTCHAs"), and learned about a service started by Amazon.com called the Mechanical Turk.
This service lets you post simple tasks that you need done that can't be automated, such as tagging GIS maps or transcribing podcasts, along with "rewards" that range from $.01 to $2.00. Random people perform the tasks, and earn the rewards. The rewards are collected in an Amazon.com account, which can then be transferred into a bank account or converted into Amazon gift certificates.
The service is billed as "artificial artificial intelligence". There have even been businesses created using the service for cheap labor. CastingWords is a podcast transcription service which charges $.42 per minute, and pays out about $.14 to "Turks" who actually do the work.
So in essence, what we have here is a way to pay far less than minimum wage for annoying tasks that can't be automated. You can even work up a business model to take advantage of the near-slave wages. Amazing!
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