Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and formulae, but in most cases the key issue is having enough data. It doesn't matter how fancy your technology is if you don't have lots and lots of clearly labelled samples.<p>Mechanical Turk (and crowdflower and a few other services) are important bridges for this. People can do important labeling and cleaning work for a cost that's affordable enough to be practical. Right now most of the work is translation, address finding or quasi spammy tasks. But the service itself has a lot of potential to do things that impact our lives in the future. Mechanical Turk workers can improve startups by helping with personalization and automation tasks, help with science and defense by labeling images and aid in all kinds of language processing and computer vision tasks that could make things cheaper and better for all of us.<p>It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. For what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage. Though I'm not sure that things like this are what the minimum wage was designed for. Completing online labeling tasks is a far cry from working in an actual sweat shop. It would be nice if there was some sort of exception for technical piece work. Mechanical Turk isn't nearly popular enough right now, but in the future as machine learning becomes more common there will be a serious demand for these tasks. I hope we can find a way to let people do data preparation work while avoiding virtual dickensian conditions of a kind of data processing industrial revolution.