Tech: Amazon's Mechanical Turk: It's a Living...or is it?

Proto-Mechnical Turkers:  "It's a living."

I have been experimenting with Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing "micro-labor" site for a couple of weeks now, like so many thousands have done.  I have been trying to determine:  is it ethical?  What are the implications, if any, for the future of work?  And of more immediate import, can I make any actual money being a Turker?

I became a Mechanical Turk Worker ("turker") on 9/27/11.  Five of the past 15 days I've given serious effort to turking, (completing HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks - from Requesters who submit them to MT) earning from $18 to $35.50 per day.  I also received a $63.17 bonus for working extra-hard to help my Requester achieve his goal.

My approval rating is 99.3% (the percentage of HITs I've done that the Requester has accepted and agreed to pay for).

The type of work I found most lucrative, for me, involved writing 50-word tips on a variety of topics.  They had to have perfect grammar and spelling, and each one had to be different.  These HITs paid 50 cents each.  I wrote approximately 240 such HITs during those five days (about 30 an hour).

The vast majority of HITs pay only a penny or two; I realized early on these were not going to make any money.  They involved doing things like indicating whether Miley Cyrus or A-Rod has chubbier cheeks.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are a number of relatively high-paying HITs that look fairly dodgy.  One asks you to go to a website, create an online dating profile, and upload a picture.  It does pay $18, but then you've joined a dating site that may, in fact, charge you an annual fee.  So it's worth steering clear of those.

After a few days of this I found myself making some actual money - a whopping $212 so far, deposited in my Amazon Payments account.  Broken down by dollars per hour, however, it works out to no more than $12/hour.  That's not terrible money for getting to sit around and make up tips.  However, it's incredibly draining:  each tip has to be different, and in order to make it worth your while financially, you have to knock them out as quickly as possible.

The other thing was that I found myself in uncharted ethical waters.  I'd like to continue this topic in another post, but let's just say I did a bit of research on my requester.  Turns out, I'm pretty sure I'm a content whore.