MTurk
Amazon’s new website, Mechanical Turk offers a great way of making a few extra pennies by completing simple tasks such as Answer a few demographical questions or Read and comment on my article on Amazon. These tasks are called HITs and can vary in price from $0.01 to $5.00.
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.
All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.
read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}
I have been a member of MTurk for all of 20 minutes so far and have taken 19 HITs, and if they are all approved I’ll have made a tidy $1.02. That means that I’m over 10% of the way of getting payment, since the minimum payment is $10.00. This payment goes straight to your U.S bank account, or in my case, your Amazon Gift Certificate Fund.
For me, this isn’t a quick-fix money making idea, it’s a time-waste with an added bonus. Most HITs take mere seconds to complete for a few cents.
