Turkers

As we all know, computers can be depended on for most tasks, but certain things - decision making, facial recognition, all these higher level cognitive tasks - humans are always better at. This is a problem that software developers and researchers in artificial intelligence face.

Well, Amazon has came out with artificial artificial intelligence. They have a service called Mechanical Turk, which I just heard about a few days ago. It is the weirdest thing.

Basically, people pay for "Turkers" to do tasks. They include things like identifying if a picture has text or not text and describing the picture in simple words. Another example would be picking out pictures in a group that do not belong. Other people pay people to read their blog and post on a topic.

It sounds cool so far, but people are only making $.01 to $.10 for each task. I read an article that called it a "virtual sweatshop."

Here is a recent article

Right now, researchers are looking at how valid some of the Turkers' work is and how to increase quality, etc. I know that some HCI people are really interested in using Mechanical Turk for research participants.

And what I want to know is... what keeps people on Turk? These people aren't making much money! Much less than minimum wage.