Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Amazon's turning people into machines with their Mechanical Turk project.

It's actually a great idea - package up simple tasks that computers can't do but humans can, and make it easy for humans to do the work for micropayments.

I spent some time rating the quality of pictures of storefronts in various US cities, and made a little bit of money. I figure if you're really good at it you could almost make minimum wage, if you did it as a full time job.

Which isn't bad, when you think about it, for a job that has basically no qualifications, that you can do at home at whatever hours you feel like working.