Work for Amazon: Digital Piecework

People will do just about anything for money . . . and apparently, the size of the payoff is not much of a factor, in some cases.

Amazon has found a way to outsource many of their trivial tasks to the web-browsing community at large, paying negligible rates for this digital piecework on a site called Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com).

The tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), involve doing things that humans can perform better than computers -- like listing your three most favorite Italian restaurants in Seattle (pay: $0.01 for completing the task). After someone on Amazon's corporate team of humans has verified your answers, the money gets transferred into an Amazon account for you. You can then transfer the cash into your personal bank account (I'm not sure if there is a transfer fee).

Some other jobs involve, for example, identifying the presence of certain features in photographs. Poking around on the website, I saw many tasks that paid nothing, and many that paid a penny apiece. The highest paid task I have read about (See infoworld.com 11/21/05; page 16) deposits a whopping three cents into your Amazon account, after the work gets approved.

This has to be one of the most creative beta tests offered on the Web. No news yet on its success. Two last thoughts on the subject:

1. Don't forget to pay your taxes on these earnings.
2. If anyone can resonably explain to me what "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" means, I will spend the price of a stamp to send you a penny for your efforts -- but only if you get it to me before the price of stamps goes up this Sunday!