Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a web service that lets you assign tasks to human workers in exchange for payments. It is named after The Turk, a chess playing automaton made by Wolfgang von Kempelen in the late 1700s (it turned out that a chess master was hiding inside the machine).
Andy Baio of Waxy was curious to see what exactly the Amazon Mechanical Turk looks like, so naturally he started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?
Here are his answers, #1:
And #2: about $0.50
I can't fathom any job on the Turk that would make it a sweatshop. I can't imagine anyone being coerced into relying on the Turk to make a living (either through force or lack of other options).
"Research & Write Copy for Bio" for two dollars.
"5 Restaurant Review in your Area" for $1.01
And then there are jobs like "Write a 10,000 word article on the latest IM trend" - for a penny.
Salon published an informative article about this in 2006: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/ The article describes this as a virtual sweatshop, and that is spot on. Instead of having to hire a person to write something and paying them the going rate, they can hire 60 bored college kids at 2 cents each.
Now, in addition to outsourcing to other countries, jobs are being "crowdsourced" for pennies. At this rate, I seriously wonder what jobs will be left in the US by 2020.