I recently noticed that an article I had posted on the old version of Undead Catgirls about Amazon's Mechanical Turk system had gotten some attention, so I'm going to repost it here with some editing. I hope you enjoy it because I sure as hell didn't. God, what a waste.
There comes a time in every young man's life when his thoughts turn to getting sweet, sweet cash from the Internet. There are many ways to make money on the Internet; some are easy, some are hard, most are demeaning. There are plenty of sites out there for people who want to make some money so they can buy manga or WoW gold, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk Marketplace is an unpleasant one. I spent a day doing jobs there and this is an inaccurate retelling of what happened. (They call this "being an unreliable narrator.")
As anyone who's seen Terminator, the Matrix, or Short Circuit knows, the fear that people will be supplanted by the machines we've created is deeply ingrained into the human psyche. People who work as Mechanical Turks assert mankind's superiority over machines by performing dull tasks for lousy amounts of money. For one frustrating day, I helped prove that humans are both smarter and dumber than machines. Swell.
My story begins simply enough: I was StumbleUpon'ing in a fit of boredom when I found a page linking to sites that would pay me to do work. "Money?" I said to myself. "Yes, money," I replied to myself. After passing over the links that required me to write blog posts for cash, I noticed the link to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Two things in the description jumped out at me: "Amazon pays you" and "simple tasks that their computers can’t understand." This seemed like something I could do! I had to read the entire description to see that the payments for these jobs would insult an eight-year-old sweatshop worker but I figured that with hard work, the tasks—being simple—would add up and that I'd be rolling in enough cash to buy a Kindle within a month.
It didn't quite work out that way.
When I reached the Welcome page for the Mechanical Turk market, I read through the introduction and skimmed the quick guide to taking jobs as a worker. Eager to begin earning my pennies, I signed up. I spent fifteen minutes trying to validate my e-mail address and another fifteen trying to figure out how to take a job because I hadn't paid enough attention to the instructions for workers. Oops! Maybe this is their way of proving that I have human intelligence. A CAPTCHA alone just doesn't cut it when you're running a market for tasks requiring human intelligence, I guess.
After some screwing around, I discovered by accident how to view and then take jobs. My first was a survey. I look at pictures and answer some questions about my thoughts. Do these people look trustworthy? Are they friendly? If you lent money to them, do you think they would pay you back? Do you know that your work will be in the news? (My answer for this last question was "no.")I did one set of pictures before the strain of trying to do a good job wore me down, so I moved on to the jobs that required me to do less strenuous work: search websites for certain buttons, click on the buttons, and then count things. I managed to do several of these for the promise of two to three cents per site before I got bored (yes, I know I get bored easily). I also took a few more surveys, did some "address correction," and generally hated not having a real job. I can't remember when I began to envy the machines for being too stupid to do jobs like these, but I'm sure I started thinking it early on.
Finally, I was done. I had gotten good and bored with the whole thing, so I called it a day. After waiting many days I was told that I had earned about five USD, which ended up being spent on one of those Rich Dad books for my brother (he's not rich yet). I suppose I could have gone for the big game, but the best job on the market at the time would have involved tacking some social networking functions onto a PHP script. Hey, there's debasing oneself and then there's debasing oneself. Being human means having standards.
Despite the title of the article, I did go back and do more work. I never as much as I did on my first day. Working as a Mechanical Turk was draining. The work I found was either frustratingly difficult or mind-numbingly easy. There was virtually nothing there that was both challenging and rewarding. I suppose that's how work is.
It may be of interest to note that the loan applicant evaluation job thing became news. I honestly don't know how to feel about having been a part of that.
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