As a full-time senior business analyst, the Pennsylvanian made a decent living. But he had a baby girl on the way, and the impending vortex of expenses — clothing, childcare, hospital bills, truckloads of diapers — threatened to push him into financial peril. Nor did selling knick-knacks on eBay, or posting up on the corner in a lemonade stand. He began to lose hope. The platform, run by Amazon, offered anyone the opportunity to earn money by completing quick, menial tasks posted by researchers: Labelling images, taking surveys, transcribing receipts. Today, he is one of a reported k workers on Mechanical Turk who collectively complete millions of tasks each month. But how much can a person really earn completing mindless tasks for pennies on the dollar? Is this a viable way to make a part-time income? The Turk was hailed as a great feat of artificial intelligence — until, of course, it was revealed that it was no machine at all, but a mechanical puppet controlled by a human chess mast...