Automaton

I spent some time this afternoon contributing to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. The idea (so far as I've come with it, at least) is that you complete different types of small tasks — brief transcriptions of audio files, or identification of photos, for example — and are paid a small (very small) premium for your work, if accepted, provided it follows some basic guidelines. I answered a half-dozen different questions — some seem to be a matter of opinion ("What is the best tennis racket brand?"), while others are more a matter of fact ("What is the definition of transmutation?").

Some tasks require specific qualifications, others seem open to anyone. My understanding is most of the requests for services come from businesses (who pay a percentage of the price of successfully completed tasks as a fee), though I've seen some instances of people using the service to encourage comments to be posted to their blogs. (I'm not quite that desperate.)

It's an interesting distraction, I suppose, and I enjoy the opportunity to learn something new, albeit trivial. But it's difficult to imagine finding the time to complete enough tasks for it to amount to anything.

(That's an engraving of The Turk, by the way, the infamous mechanical device from which the service takes it's name. Perhaps my goal will be to earn enough to purchase a copy of this book!)