

The researcher behind these statistics runs a website showing worker demographics, updated hourly. In 2010, cash payments for Indian workers were introduced, which gave new and updated results on the demographics of workers, who remained primarily within the United States. Workers have been primarily located in the United States since the platform's inception with demographics generally similar to the overall Internet population in the US.

maximum time a worker has to work on a single task,.how many workers they want to work on each HIT,.how much are they paying for each HIT accomplished,.When employers set up their job, they must specify Requesters can use the Amazon Mechanical Turk API to programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. As of April 2019, Requesters paid Amazon a minimum 20% commission on the price of successfully completed jobs, with increased amounts for additional services. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which affects the Worker's reputation. Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill qualifications before engaging in a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the qualification. Payment for completing tasks can be redeemed on via gift certificate (gift certificates are the only payment option available to international workers, apart from India) or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. Workers can have a postal address anywhere in the world. In 2013, the average wage for the multiple microtasks assigned, if performed quickly, is about one dollar an hour, with each task averaging a few cents.

Workers must report their income as self-employment income. This is aimed to evade the minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Amazon classifies the Workers as contractors rather than employees, and refuses to file forms or pay payroll taxes. Workers set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept any particular task. Workers have access to a dashboard that displays three sections: total earnings, HIT status and HIT totals. Overview Ī user of Mechanical Turk can be either a "Worker" (contractor) or a "Requester" (employer). Those construction workers can still file a lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act for wage theft, even though they are not considered employees" under Amazon's contract. In US labor law, according to Professor Miriam Cherry, Saint Louis University School of Law, "workers on Mechanical Turk are no different than, say, construction workers who show up at job sites and work for a day or two on a project. By 2018, research had demonstrated that while there were over 100,000 workers available on the platform at any time, only around 2000 were actively working. In the same year, Techlist published an interactive map pinpointing the locations of 50,000 of their MTurk workers around the world. This increased to over 500,000 registered workers from over 190 countries in January 2011. In March 2007, there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries.

HIT types have expanded to include transcribing, rating, image tagging, surveys, and writing. In early- to mid-November 2005, there were tens of thousands of jobs, all of them uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence. Following its launch, the Mechanical Turk user base grew quickly. MTurk was launched publicly on November 2, 2005. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk online service uses remote human labor hidden behind a computer interface to help employers perform tasks that are not possible using a true machine. It was later revealed that this "machine" was not an automaton at all, but was, in fact, a human chess master hidden in the cabinet beneath the board and controlling the movements of a humanoid dummy. The name Mechanical Turk was inspired by " The Turk", an 18th-century chess-playing automaton made by Wolfgang von Kempelen that toured Europe, beating both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It is claimed that Jeff Bezos was responsible for the concept that led to Amazon's Mechanical Turk being developed to realize this process. Amazon coined the term artificial artificial intelligence for processes outsourcing some parts of a computer program to humans, for those tasks carried out much faster by humans than computers. The service was conceived by Venky Harinarayan in a US patent disclosure in 2001.
