Michael Arrington at Techcrunch cannot help but call it The Matrix, because of his Matrix-we-are-all-plugged-into-a-machine vision of this application.

He’s referring to the Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk as it is known.

According to the Wikipedia article, the name Mechanical Turk comes from a certain chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. Called "The Turk," it toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, but turned out not to really be an automaton at all: a chess master hid in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows the machines of today to perform tasks they aren’t yet suited for without having human help. Here’s the link to the book on The Turk.

Also referred to as AAI – Artificial Artificial Intelligence, the concept is pretty simple. In AI, one would generally expect the machines to do the tasks that humans would do. Of course, there are tasks owing to current technology deficiencies that only humans can do – compare photographs, transcribe podcasts to name a few. Thus you define HITs(Human Intelligence Tasks) and volunteers pick these HITs, complete the tasks and submit them. In return, they are paid when a person who defined the HIT accepts it. The money earned is then deposited in their Amazon accounts. Amazon keeps a 10% margin on what the requester pays.

Really neat service! So will Morpheus from The Matrix say - What are you waiting for? You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are, know you are. Come on! Stop trying to HIT me and HIT me!

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