I have something to confess. For the last few months I've spent countless hours moonlighting on a wide array of odd jobs. Really odd jobs. I've worked in the porn industry. I've censored online content. I've helped schoolteachers bust plagiarists. I've touted real estate. And I've burned my personal social network, all for remarkably little return. My take for all of the afterhours toil: $17.75.
What I've been doing, to be specific, is participating in Amazon.com's weirdest business venture: Amazon Mechanical Turk. The big idea--and everything involving Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has a big idea--is to outsource the gritty little mental tasks that computers can't do. IBM's Watson supercomputer can play Jeopardy!, sure. But let's see Watson tout obscure Mexican hotels.
Mechanical Turk may be the most mature example of how the Internet is transforming the market for casual labor. The startup Fancy Hands lets workers tackle a wide range of chores for its customers, from setting up dinner appointments to researching prices at local gyms, for a few bucks per assignment. TaskRabbit vets workers who compete to perform chores in the real world, like assembling furniture or picking up an iPad, for the lowest price.
There are two kinds of participants in this new world of work. Mechanical Turk's "workers" perform tasks, and "requesters" assign jobs. Each task is referred to as a Human Interface Task, or HIT. Amazon built Mechanical Turk in 2005 to help with tasks such as classifying chandeliers in its online store. It's since turned that outsourcing scheme into a service: Amazon even offers software application programming interfaces, or "hooks," so businesses can build Turk into their own business processes.
Mechanical Turk takes its name from an 18th-century scam. In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he touted as an automaton chess player. Think of it as the original Deep Blue. It beat some of the best players of the day and baffled everyone else. The trick: Von Kempelen stashed an actual chess master inside the machine. Inside Amazon's Mechanical Turk: more than 500,000 humans.
Intrigued by this new world of freelance work, I decided to become one of them. My plan: Make some money, then spend it hiring Amazon's Turkers to work for me.
The first thing I learned, after being assigned worker ID A356ODAVC86ZYS, is that the pay varies. Some jobs pay nothing. "Workers" do them to qualify for better-paying work. Many jobs promise to pay only a penny. Write a catalogue listing and you might make 5 cents. Translate a passage from Levantine Arabic into English and you get a dollar. Too bad I don't speak Arabic.
While there are some jobs I can't do, there are others I won't. One requester asked for a 500-word article on Metformin--a diabetes drug--and pregnancy. Sorry, no. Not even for the princely sum of $2. I have written other stuff, however, involving drugs I can't understand and side effects I don't want to know about (erectile dysfunction is involved). Next time you turn to a search engine for medical advice, keep in mind that it might actually be coming from me.
While I won't endanger the unborn, I will do porn. If you claim to be over 18 you can work with adult content. For 10 cents a scene, I've written dirty titles for some very dirty videoclips. I hope "Candy" is making more than that. She's earned it.
Even if you're getting paid, however, looking at porn gets boring after a while. Being a virtual snitch is more fun. One teacher pays workers 15 cents to search the Web for content his students may have plagiarized. Bust a student and you get a bonus. Sorry, kid, you got an F because I needed 10 cents. Drop a dime and I make a dime.
Then there are the really dirty jobs, such as writing about real estate. As a longtime renter, I haven't lost money on real estate. Now you can not lose money, too! To make money, however, you've got to write nice things about buying homes. At least it pays. And, as they say, I'm building an audience.
Or not. According to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, a news site that tracks the search industry, many websites will hire writers to generate lots of content related to a topic, such as real estate, to boost their standing with search engines. Algorithms, not people, are the audience.
Depressed, I comfort myself with menial tasks such as screening a series of pictures for anything containing "nudity, partial nudity and pornography," or "hate, profanity and racism." I scan images, and make ... 4 cents.
Even more robotic: clicking on links from Google searches for hotels, then finding a hotel's Google Places page, where Google aggregates data on the property. Once on each hotel's Google Places page it's my job to copy the contact info and paste it into a form. Two cents a hit. It's easy work.
Alas, most of that work is just misdirection. Search Engine Land's Sullivan says the point of these jobs is most likely to drive traffic to the Google Places page to influence how high the page shows up in search results. "They're hoping to make you feel like you're actually doing something and throw you off-base," Sullivan says. "They have to give you a task."
Desperate for funds, I start to flail. One requester says he will pay 10 cents if I send a message to a Twitter feed or other social network with more than ten followers. Sold. "For the best Assisted Living Facilities in your area check out ourparents.com/assistedliving," I tweet.
I wasn't making money as quickly as I had hoped. So I figured it was time to widen the scope of my project. I sign up for Fancy Hands, which provides virtual assistants who can do anything that doesn't involve the use of personal financial information or the need to travel through physical space. Fancy Hands, in turn, outsources those tasks for a small sum a job.
First on my to-do list for Fancy Hands: I ask them to schedule a family celebration with my mother. It's her 71st birthday! I'm sure she won't mind the impersonal touch. I've got a new kid. Plus I've got a pile of porn to look at on Amazon Turk, and "Candy" isn't going to categorize herself. Fancy Hands delivers, even if my relatives don't exactly cooperate. My sister-inlaw's reaction: "Is this a joke?"
Meanwhile, after days spent tackling low-paying jobs such as writing titles for porn clips, I thought I was ready to move up. I was ready to have the Turkers work for me. It turns out getting someone to do your job for you isn't for the lazy. I manage to outsource a post on Apple and Intel's new Thunderbolt technology for $1. For $4.25 I hire a Turk to recommend a course of homeopathic treatment after a blood test hinted at liver problems (so much for the rising costs of health care). But when I try to rent a digital mob to post comments to colleagues' stories, I run into problems.
On the community bulletin board Turker Nation, the workers were revolting. They criticized my work history: "105 HITS and has a 90% approval rate," one typically perfectionist commenter scoffed. They called me cheap: "Not only is he a smacktard, he's a lowballer as well." They called me out on violating Amazon's terms of service: "If anyone reported your HITs they'd be taken down and your requester account could be suspended," one wrote (and, in fact, two HITs seeking comments on other FORBES blogs were removed for violating Amazon's policies).
Ouch. Artificial intelligence indeed. Forty percent of these people have college degrees. Ask them to do something stupid and they won't cooperate. So consider that an endorsement: If you've got an interesting, well-thought-out task for the Turks, don't hesitate to use this service. Just follow the rules. And avoid using A356ODAVC86ZYS for anything you want to keep confidential.
Turkers Talk Back
Who knows more about how to be a Turk than a Turk? After unsuccessfully reaching out to the embassy of the Republic of Turkey, I took the advice of FORBES commenter "toobusytowork" and posted a task on Mechanical Turk itself asking for feedback on a series of blog posts I wrote about my experiences doing jobs on Amazon Mechanical Turk. I offered to pay 20 cents per tip, with a 15-cent bonus for quality responses. I also reached out to Turkers, as they're known, on third-party bulletin boards such as Turker Nation.
Boy, did I get an earful. Here's a sampling:
@BID (VIA TURKER NATION): " ... the situation has turned into a win/win for Brian. No matter what happens, on several levels, he has fresh fodder for new articles. I wouldn't be surprised to see an article on the reaction of the Turker Nation to the previous articles. Now he is trying to recruit Turkers to provide that content. He may not have set out with that plan in mind, but he is turning the situation to his advantage. Give the devil his due."
@SOJURN (VIA TURKER NATION): "I don't see what is so offending about the article. It probably mirrors the experience of the average Turker."
PAID FEEDBACK, VIA MECHANICAL TURK: "You do a good job pointing out the problems that the use of Mechanical Turk can bring if companies underestimate the expertise that their projects require. I just wish you had also pointed out the advantages there are for Turkers, which may well be worth earning $5 an hour rather than $7 (for an American): being able to work on interesting assignments only; immediately knowing how much a job will pay without the need to submit a CV, go to an interview and negotiate; not having to spend time or money on a commute; being able to work with a lot of interruptions; being able to work any time of the day and from anywhere. ... "
@TOOBUSYTOWORK COMMENTED: "Why do I do this? For the money, of course, as little as it is; my goal is $10 a day, which I exceed fairly often and which is my contribution to my household as I cannot stand the thought of working for minimum wage again. That is like being a slave, with being told what to do and the hours to do it and being grateful for even a piddlin' 5-cents-an-hour raise. But I also do it because, in many ways, it challenges me in a way that makes me happy. I sleep better at night knowing I have helped a linguistics professor teach his computer how to understand human language or I have updated a badly overloaded database directory."
PAID FEEDBACK, VIA MECHANICAL TURK: "The best way to use Mturk as a worker is deciding how much your time is worth. For example I have decided that my time is worth a minimum of $6 an hour. ... I took the time to learn how long certain types of hits take, and I only do those that pay enough. If you work on Mturk this way, you won't be contributing to [the acceptance of] slave-labor wages that many requesters offer. By the way, this hit took me longer than two minutes, but I choose to complete it anyway because it is interesting. I'll make up for it on my next hit, in which I'll earn 27 cents for one minute of work."
