Amazon's Mechanical Turk: Earn USD$7/hr to identify pictures

In science fiction and gaming there is a long history of protagonists visiting electronic terminals to accept and perform jobs on demand. Now it can finally happen for real!

Amazon search engine A9 has spent a long time taking pictures of every storefront in select US cities. Why? Well, when you search for a business on A9, you are given a chance to see the actual storefront of the building.

The problem is that tying address data to automated snapshots of GPS co-ordinates is not terribly accurate when performed electronically. Glancing at an image to determine anything useful is practically impossible for computers. But not for people...

Enter the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Now the millions of idle humans online can earn pennies for a few seconds of work that a machine can't do!

For just under an hour, I identified the picture in a series of images that best represented the business name and address given to me. Most often, my choice was "None of the above". The tasks took a few seconds to complete, paying 3 US cents each.

The tasks aren't limited to A9 though. Amazon is providing an API for working with the Mechanical Turk system so that anyone with any task that needs human decisions can benefit. To keep the results accurate there is a rating system for users that gives scores based on their actions. A few of my own tasks were even rejected, possibly where I matched a street address that did not show the actual storefront very well. (This is a big problem with strip malls that have parking lots in front.)

Now, the system is effectively limited to the US at the moment because actual cash payouts go only to US bank accounts. Everyone else can only apply the money earned to Amazon.com purchases.

But when more banking systems are supported, there will be some important questions to consider. Questions like "Why pay Americans 3 cents per task when we can pay Chinese workers half a cent per task?". A Chinese citizen doing illicit gold farming for massive multiplayer games is without a doubt earning less than the USD$7/hr rate I was able to achieve on MT.

For now though, we can earn a few dollars towards a book we want without guilt.