Bill Machrone



Everybody's learning how to Turk—or they soon will. When I first heard the term, I thought Turking was some kind of ethnic slur, but it's just a way for people to earn money from home with their computers. Turking takes big tasks and breaks them down into small components that can be done at your computer, typically through a browser interface. You get paid each time you complete a task.

Turking gets its name from "the Turk," an 18th-century mechanical chess-playing machine that had a life-size wooden mannequin in Turkish garb seated at a chess board. Below the board was a myriad of gears and levers, ostensibly the first artificial intelligence. The Turk defeated nearly all challengers and was hailed as an engineering breakthrough. But it actually housed a chess-savvy human within and thus was an artificial artificial intelligence.

Amazon picked up on this latter idea: That for some tasks, there is no substitute for human intelligence. It created a Web services application that recruits and screens Turkers, lists tasks from requesters, presents the tasks to Turkers, collects their work, and accumulates their earnings. The tasks themselves, called HITs, for Human Intelligence Tasks, include identifying numeric strings in text documents, photo recognition/analysis, programming/coding tasks, and knowledge base/opinion entries. Check it out at

As I write this, the list of HIT requests is very limited. Most entail tasks such as naming the three best pizza parlors in Philadelphia or the three best sushi salons in Silicon Valley. For performing each of these challenging feats of human intelligence, you'll receive the munificent sum of one cent. "A penny for your thoughts" takes on new significance.

I don't mean to denigrate the idea behind Turking. Transcribing podcasts and assigning keywords to photos are probably best done by humans. I know for sure that my computer has no opinion on sushi, and if it did, I wouldn't be interested. I can even accept the idea of code snippets and modules being written by an army of programmers, although I can't put the image of a million monkeys and a million typewriters out of my mind.—Continue reading...