Will Mechanical Turks Save the World?

For those who have never heard this term, a recent article in the Independent Newspaper outlines how you can earn money from the internet by doing such bizarrely different tasks such as language translation to answering off-beam questions. Before you all rush to earn your fortune, the hourly rate on offer is usually way below minimum wage, but it is interesting how the wisdom of the crowd is now being used to complete tasks which were either expensive or impossible before. What is more interesting is that the Mturk-ers providing their services for next to peanuts are actually doing it - this can only be explained by the social computing phenomenon that has lead to MySpace, YouTube and the rest.

But is this relevant for sustainability? Well, this shrinking virtual world surely omeans that searching for services becomes easier and hence less of the world's resources will be consumed in the hunt for a provider. In the old old days, if you wanted to translate something, you probably invited suppliers for interview, set up a contract and posted the information backwards and forwards. In the future, no search or contracts will be necessary as the market will provide the lowest cost (and CO2) solution.

So will Mturks save the world? Well, not quite, but maybe this ultimate market solution will start to chip away at some of our assumptions of where work resides and thus gives an opportunity for consumption reduction.