While in the “library” I was glancing through the lastest real paper issue of InfoWorld and a brief blurb about Amazon Mechanical Turk caught my eye. The most basic explanation is that Amazon will pay you to do simple tasks better suited to humans rather than machines. Right now that seems limited to choosing the best pictures for their A9 Yellow Pages. The no brainer is that human eyes can see the actual street address or storefront name better than a computer can… for the time being. Each HIT (Human Intelligence Task), in this case picking the best picture out of a group, pays 3 cents and is subject to approval or rejection by the business listing the task. Once businesses outside of A9 were involved I would assume that the rate of pay per HIT would go up (or down) based on the difficulty and time it would take to complete it. I did 36 HITs and will go back tomorrow to see if they were approved. Unfortunately I did not time the set of tasks but I don’t think I’ll quit the day job just yet. Something to add the Million Dollar Experiment.