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Requesters post individual, standalone tasks to be completed for a pre-determined compensation. Users complete those tasks, and, if the work is approved by the requester, will receive the stated compensation, plus, optionally, a bonus.
This is a concept that I've wished for at various times in my professional life, and I am especially heartened to see a well-known name like Amazon get into this area.
First, some interesting background - historically, the mechanical Turk was a chess-playing machine that was, in fact, controlled by a human. Thus, artificial artificial intelligence!
I see two main reasons for this type of offering:
- An extension of the consulting / offshore work model - Perhaps because I come from a consulting background, I have a natural inclination to blended teams, incorporating groups with different attributes
and cost structures to deliver while minimizing cost.
This is a workforce that is truly flexible - the contract extends as long as the individual HIT (minutes or hours) with no ongoing commitment from either party. If the project is canceled or its budget cut, simply remove the listing from the website. If a particular worker does poor work, reject his submissions.
This is a workforce that is truly flexible - the contract extends as long as the individual HIT (minutes or hours) with no ongoing commitment from either party. If the project is canceled or its budget cut, simply remove the listing from the website. If a particular worker does poor work, reject his submissions.
Obviously this type of workforce will only be applicable to certain types of tasks - easily subdivided, smaller, requiring no special skills or training, and easily validated. But, from my own professional career, I can think of numerous instances when we could have used a workforce like this. I remember in one meeting saying something like 'we just need 10 people to sit in a room for 2 weeks and do [something].' We didn't want to take any of our employees or consultants off their current assignments, and anyway there was no need to pay someone a consulting rate to do this type of work. We considered requesting interns, but it wasn't much of a learning opportunity. We needed exactly the type of workforce that MTurk offers. - Humans remain better at some tasks - Consider the seemingly ubiquitous example of extracting garbled text from an image and entering it in a text box - relatively easy for a human, but difficult to write a program to do the same.
At the same time, even processes that can be fully automated generally require a human in the feedback loop before getting to that state. Human writes program, program provides output, human validates output, human modifies program, and so on.
Often, that feedback loop involves only the developer/tester, but in many systems, especially those that are self-learning or intelligent, and those in which the possible answer set is large or the possible answers unknown, the amount of validation may be very large.
- Do advertisements for certain flagged search keywords fall under any restricted product/service types?
- Audio transcription
- Translation
- Do user-entered images meet certain requirements?
- Find information from various sources and consolidate into a consistent format.
- Bookmark site X on digg/StumbleUpon, follow user Y on Twitter
- Write a review of website X on your blog
- Rewrite this sentence in your own words (must be statistically 50% different than original) (which I assume will be used to post multiple posts on a site that doesn't allow duplicates)
- Sign up as a subscriber on site X
- Fill out a survey online (which then took you to an advertisement and dropped a cookie)
And, I've already earned $0.28!
