Mechanical Turk = Genius

Amazon is attempting to disintermediate the whole ‘let’s farm out our manual, monotonous tasks to the third world via some exploitative local company with ties to the home country’ industry with their Amazon Mechanical Turk – an example of ‘artificial Artificial Intelligence.’ 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.

Here’s a choice example of the type of thing you could do with the Turk:

Automotive Product Title and Feature Point Content

Your task is to edit an existing Automotive product title to make it more human readable and update and add additional feature points about the product. This HIT (ed: Human Intelligence Task) will require some research to complete. Approval depends on the quality of your title and feature points, determined by a manual review.

For each one of those you do, you’d get $0.40. Not enough to make me want to do it, but I bet it’s more than enough for some. Fifty grand in seed capital and a little engineering work and I could probably set myself up as a low-rent competitor to CNET Channel. Did I mention how much I like this initiative? Because let me tell you – outsourcing the sort of grunt work the Turk could potentially do is a giant throbbing pain in parts that shouldn’t be hurting.

Another inspired initiative by a market leader looking to become a market maker.