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May23
Specialists and Generalists: is Mechanical Turk the Blueprint for Future Work?
What if you managed a project or a business where the small details were farmed out to be done (and paid for) in micro-chunks.  This is what Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service does.  It is an online employment exchange for micro-tasks that need to be done by a person but which can be parcelled out via the Web.

Mark Wallace takes it even further - what if those tasks were parcelled out to people within a virtual world, such as Second Life (SL)?  The tasks may take from a few minutes to an hour to complete, the player submits the finished product and is paid immediately.

This scenario leads naturally to the question: who ties everything together?  Will the generalists migrate to be the hub around which an ever-changing cast of specialists revolves?

In a way we've seen this happen already in outsourcing.  There are even virtual companies, that outsource everything, R&D, manufacturing, fulfillment and billing.  Mark suggests that this model can be scaled down infinitely. 

I'm putting together a simple postcard that I can use to follow-up with prospects.  One person has created a drawing, another provided some copy and I'm pulling them both together for the card.  Is this how most work will be done in the future?

Update:  A commenter to Mark's post says that Amazon's Mechanical Turk isn't widely used at all.

2 Comments/Trackbacks




Mechanical Turk is still a "beta" service, which may be why not that many people are using it yet. Actually, I checked it out and it looks like lots of people are using it, and there really are thousands of jobs in it right now. Ok, they pay like $0.01 but it's hardly empty.

Thanks for pointing that out, Marcus. Have you used it, either as an employer or a contractor?

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