Factory workers assembling something
Many years ago, there was this concept of piecework. Let’s say you were a manufacturer of knickknacks or whatever, and instead of setting up a factory and an assembly line, you wanted to save a few pennies. You would then give the raw materials to the workers, who would take it home, assemble it at home, bring it back and get paid by the piece.
Amazon, which continues to revolutionize the web, has a product called Mechanical Turk. They have brought piecework into the digital age. We do so much of our work in the digital world, why should we not be able to have the concept of piecework be taken to the web? You define the work, define how you will pay for it, how you will check the work, and hundreds of thousands of people pile in to get it done, at rates that can way below minimum wage in the USA. There is nothing preventing people outside the USA from doing the work, even agreeing it to do for wages that are below the US minimum wage.
If you really think about it, what has Amazon really done? They have taken existing institutions and squeezed the inefficiencies out of them. They squeezed all the fat (and a lot of the fun) out of the bookselling business, the electronics business, and came up with a good electronic book reader, among other things.
This is a great article at iamelgringo.com that will give you a good idea of how Amazon Mechanical Turk works. But I think the product could be named something more descriptive, like ’21st Century Piecework’.
