Video: Turking for a Living

Mechanical Turk is a Market place for work

We give businesses and developers access to an on-demand,scalable workforce.

Workers select fomr thousand of tasks and work whenever it's convinient.

HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks - are individual tasks that you work on.

« [..] The computer has a task that is easy for a human but extraordinarily hard for the computer. So instead of calling a computer service to perform the function, it calls a human.» Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans - New York Times.

The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (German: Schachtürke, "chess Turk"' Hungarian: A Török), was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax.