People As Platform

On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job board, a recent posting simply read “enter missing data.” The task was described as “add and edit data from a pdf.” The pay: 25 cents. Amazon describes Mechanical Turk, a website that has been operational since 2005, as providing “an on-demand scalable, human workforce to complete jobs that humans can do better than computers.” Indeed, that is the purpose of many of the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed on the site: getting a human brain to figure out something that artificial intelligence is not able to do, yet.

A vast network of people inform the automatic smart technology that is changing our world by making everything easier, from Google image searches to identifying objectionable content. Somewhere along the line, a human had to tell the computers what’s what. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is designed partly to find and fill that information void—the site’s tagline describes it as “artificial artificial...