Web sweatshops are not too far off
Posted on Thursday, November 3, 2005
at 10:23 PM (permalink)
A friend of mine has been talking about harnessing labor in third-world countries as a cheaper form of "artificial intelligence" for years. Instead of writing code to perform cognitive tasks, it would be cheaper to give computers and net connections to thousands of people and let them "automate" tasks that are better done by a human mind. It looks like Amazon has finally done just that. They have launched a beta of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allows humans to complete cognitive tasks at low-cost, piecework prices. I could try to describe this, but you have to see it to believe it. (via Google Blogscoped)
