A New Mechanical Turk

The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th century fake chess playing machine. Amazon took this name and applied it to their online crowd sourcing marketplace.

I tried Amazon's Mechanical Turk once and spent an hour or two executing menial tasks - completing surveys, that sort of thing. I think I earned a couple of dollars. The AMT does have a loyal band of operators though, particularly in low cost countries (especially India) and it is easily possible to make minimum wage with some practice. The key is choosing the best jobs as they appear.

Well Gems are launching a new blockchain based protocol for Mechanical Turks. They argue that they can build a new protocol for verifiable distributed labor that will be lower cost for employers and higher reward for operators. We shall see.

Crowd sale registration is closing on 8th January. An early working protocol should be released later in the year.