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Tech Bloggers Discuss Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Bloggers are discussing Amazon.com's latest service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. The service is named after a famous hoax pulled by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen. Kemeplen fooled people with a contraption called the the Turk that was supposed to be a mechanical chess-playing automaton but actually contained a chess expert inside.
The Turk was a wooden cabinet on wheels, atop which sat a chessboard and a life-sized wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish style. This mysterious contraption would play against, and often defeat, human opponents. In truth the Turk was a clever illusion: the cabinet concealed a human chess expert who moved the Turk's arm and played the games.
Amazon.com's service allows companies to assign simple tasks that can be completed by people with Internet access in exchange for some micropayments to their Amazon.com account. Amazon.com is already using the service itself to improve their A9 yellow page service. They ask people to select from several photographs the one that best presents the front of a business. Amazon.com will take a 10% commission on each completed task -- which are also known as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs.
There are no up-front fees to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. Instead, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects a 10% commission on top of the amount you (the "Requester") have paid someone to complete your Human Intelligence Tasks ("HITs"). The minimum commission charge is $0.005 per HIT.
The service has already been Slashdotted and "Mechanical Turk" is now the #1 search on Technorati.
Yardley.ca refers to the new Amazon service as genius.
The message is entertainingly bizarre but the concept is terrific. Companies use an API to submit tasks requiring mundane but human intelligence to Amazon; people abroad willing to work for peanuts (but more than they'd make otherwise) use Amazon to complete these tasks, and Amazon gets a small cut rather than the extortionate overhead taken by the eight million outsourcing "firms" (I use the word 'firm' loosely) that e-mail me inappropriately every time I post a job on Craigslist.
Other comments:
See Win App says "Get 3rd World Wages, right here in the US"
DocBug says it sounds similar to OpenMind
SearchViews shows a picture of pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters to represent how much people will make.
Sumedh Mungee raises the HIT hacker or spam possibility: "And what if someone automates responses to the articifial artificial intelligence machine? Run a robot on your machine, and watch the money flow to your bank account!"
Belligerati has found a picture of Kempelen's Turk.
Other blogger posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Technorati shows just 125 posts so far but there will be many more by Monday morning.
Posted on November 4, 2005
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