phaithful

I probably experienced the biggest waste of my life tonight. I've been messing around with Amazon's S3 service and in doing so, I stumbled across another service that Amazon has called the Mechanical Turk. The basic premise is: there are certain tasks that computers can't do but humans can do very easily. So for each repetitive task you can make a few cents. If the task is hard then you make more, if the task is easy... well you make less.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon provides this lengthy explanation of where the term Mechanical Turk comes from an yaddie yaddie yaddie... Of course I didn't want to read all that so I skip down to the line that says
"One of the best ways to understand Amazon Mechanical Turk is to complete a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) and see what the experience is like."

My Attempts at Human Intelligence Tasks

I'm an idiot so I sign up and try out a few. I filled out some 1 question demographic questions at $0.02 a pop. That took me about 5 minutes and I answered about 15 questions... Then I took a few surveys for $0.20 a pop which took about 10 minutes each. Then I scoured the web to find "Magic Blogs" that had a Google PageRank of 3 or more which took about half an hour to find 4 @ a rate of $0.16 each. Surprisingly there aren't too many well ranking blogs solely on the topic of magic tricks.

So if you calculate it... YIKES!!!!

• Time: 5 minutes Wage: 15 Questions x $0.02 = $0.30
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 3 Surveys x $0.20 = $0.60
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 4 Magic Blogs + Contact info x $0.16 = $0.64
• Total Time: 65 minutes, Total Wage: $1.54.

OMG!!!! That's $1.42 / hour. Talk about a waste of life. Even wasting away my life watching YouTube is more valuable than that... at least I get some joy out of YouTube. I know, in some countries $1.42 / hour could feed a whole village, and I sympathize with those people... but even that U.S. [insert crappiest job you can think of] worker gets paid five times (5x) as much.

Well now I know, if I ever need a mundane tasks to be performed, I can find some suckers on the Mechanical Turk. I want the last hour of my life back.....