But in a few months you could have, like, $5!!!!

I know! Like OMG I'm so there! Ouch, that whip hurt though.

I actually think it's quite exciting. Sort of those distributed computing projects, only with brains.

One day, we'll go to work in this giant barn and hook our brains into the company network, bypassing the inefficient human interface.

200 HITs/hr * $0.03/HIT = $6/hr * 10hr = $60/workday * 6 workdays (Sabbath day off) = $360/wk * 51 wks (1 wk vacation) = $18,360 - $4,590 taxes (1099's a bitch) = $13,770 - $600 overhead (cable modem, misc new keyboards) = $13,170 take home. Should be enough to cover ramen and the physical therapy for carpal tunnel.

flopsy has the right answer here (well, ok, the first paragraph is right). This allows people to do arbitrary distributed computing projects that are not strictly limited to things that a computer can do. There are a lot of large-scale, mundane tasks that would otherwise be farmed out to computer, that simply can't be done by computer.

One application that works on closing this gap (that is, between things that computers can do and things they can't) is to feed such human-generated data into machine learning algorithms. This is something that's of interest to people in machine learning research right now -- I wrote a brief explanation of it a few months ago. When the Amazon project was first announced, it was circulated pretty rapidly within some ML communities. Whether anyone is currently using it for that purpose I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me -- I've heard of very similar projects before.

Ah, but will machines ever be able to surpass us at human error?

I gave it a try for a few minutes, i could feel my self getting dummer by the second. i hop i cn recovr :(