Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Amazon.com has an interesting new service called Mechanical Turk. You can do small tasks over the internet that earn a few cents apiece. Some of the tasks include naming the band from an album cover and checking that a website is relevant to a specific business. You might earn between 1 and 5 cents per tasks for these examples.

These are tasks that are easy for a human, but hard for a computer. Hopefully as the number of tasks grows there will be some that are worth larger rewards. There is a qualification system, so it is possible that lucrative tasks only appear to the people who are qualified.

My Monster.com agent feed for "Artificial Intelligence" jobs also informs me that Amazon.com is looking for a new manager for the project.