Mechanical Turk offers workers the freedom to complete menial tasks for small sums of cash. The platform, run by Amazon, offeres anyone the opportunity to earn money by completing quick, menial tasks posted by researchers: labelling images, taking surveys, transcribing receipts. These tasks can pay as little as $0.01. Today, a reported 500k workers on Mechanical Turk collectively complete millions of tasks each month.
How much can a person really earn completing mindless tasks for pennies on the dollar? Is this a viable way to make a part-time income?
So, what is Mechanical Turk? In the 18th century, an unbeatable chess-playing “machine” called The Turk toured Europe, infamously defeating the likes of Ben Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The Turk was hailed as a great feat of artificial intelligence — until, of course, it was revealed that it was no machine at all, but a mechanical puppet controlled by a human chess master who hid in a box under the board. Today, Amazon runs its own iteration of this concept, dubbed Mechanical Turk (MTurk for short).
Launched in 2005, MTurk is a platform where “requesters” post mind-numbingly boring jobs called “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) that workers can complete for very small sums of cash. These HITs are typically things that computers and algorithms can’t quite handle yet — everything from psychological surveys to the identification of “not safe for work” images.
A large percentage of the requesters who post these tasks are academic researchers with limited budgets, and tech companies looking to compile human-cultured data that can be fed to AI algorithms. When a worker logs into the MTurk dashboard, they see a list of available HITs, who they’re offered by, the deadline, and the pay. They might choose to transcribe a receipt ($0.01), summarize a block of text ($0.35), or take a behavioral economics survey ($1).
Some HITs take 10 minutes and pay out $1 (a $6/hour pay rate); others call for 5 minutes and pay $0.10 ($1.20/hour). Requesters have control over the rates they choose to set — and Amazon takes a 20%-45% cut of each transaction. This is a lousy deal for those completing the tasks. Yet, Amazon hundreds of thousands of registered workers flock to MTurk each month.
Jeff Bezos has dubbed the workers of MTurk “artificial artificial intelligence;” they prefer the term “Turkers.” Turkers skew young (77% fall between the ages of 18-37), educated (70% have a B.A. or higher), and slightly female (51%). Despite an uptick in foreign users over the past few years, the majority of them (75%) are based in the US.
However, These workers also tend to suffer economically. One in 3 Turkers is unemployed, and the average Turker reports a household income of about $47k per year ($12k below the US national average). In a recent Pew survey, 25% of Turkers said they used MTurk because they lacked other available opportunities.
A 2018 academic study analyzed 3.8m tasks completed by 2,676 workers on MTurk and found that average earnings through the platform amounted to $2 per hour. Only 4% of all workers earned more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.
The amount they earn on MTurk is determined almost entirely on their ability to:
- Secure as many “higher-paying” (i.e. minimum wage +) tasks as possible,
- Complete them as fast as possible within the bounds of what requesters will accept. If the job isn’t completed satisfactorily, it can be rejected without pay.
Roughly 80% of all tasks on the site are completed by just 20% of Turkers, who use a suite of tools and browser extensions, optimizing every move. They build software tools that automatically alerted them of well-paying HITs with a chirp or chime. They installed browser extensions that tracked hourly rates and optimized workflow.
Like most tech platforms, MTurk is a land of haves and have-nots, where most earn paltry sums and a small subset optimizes its way to success. For others in the latter category, it’s a welcome opportunity. Making money beats doing nothing.
I wasn’t going to get a brain transplant but then I changed my mind