Okay, I give up.  What exactly is Amazon up to with its Mechanical Turk platform? 

You don’t know about the Mechanical Turk?  Where have you been?  It’s been getting all kinds of press lately, including a big splash in Salon.  The Mechanical Turk (let’s call it the Turk, for short) is a web-services platform that uses an auction-style system to farm out to willing human beings tasks that a computer can’t do–for example, tell you whether a face in a photograph is a man or a woman or what color a dress is or create a reliable restaurant guide for Kansas City.   

The Turk is named after a  famous exhibit in the 1760s, by Hungarian showman Wolfgang von Kempelen, in which a chess-playing wooden automaton, known as The Mechanical Turk and dressed like a Turkish pasha, played chess against (and usually defeated) human beings including, it is rumored, Benjamin Franklin.  It was later discovered that the whole thing was a hoax; there was a small but very bright human chess expert hidden inside the machine. 

There are humans inside Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, too, people with too much time on their hands like you and me, who have signed on to perform menial HITs (”human intelligence tasks”) for fees that generally range from two cents to a dime per HIT. 

Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?  Give it try.  Go to http://www.mturk.com/ and sign up and Amazon will fix you up with your own “dashboard” where you can ”bid” on whatever tasks you’re qualified to perform.  (Yes, if you want to get into the big buck stuff, like say HITs that pay a dollar, you need to prove you’re qualified.) 

Here’s one:  “Verify information (such as address and hours) about a restaurant by proofreading and conducting research online.”  Pays $.03 a HIT.  Let’s see, if I do 50 of these, I’ll have $1.50.  Awesome.

Why would people want to perform these mind-numbling tasks for virtually nothing?  Who knows?  Is there any possible way that Amazon can make money at this?  Doesn’t seem likely.

What?  You think the whole thing is a big publicity stunt dreamed up by Amazon to get people talking.  A hoax, just like the original Mechancial Turk, or maybe a private bet by Jeff Bezos that he could get people to do literally anything online for nothing–no matter how stupid it was.

Nah.  Wouldn’t be that.  Would it?