Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

Today, the things that people do to earn a few extra pennies.

I had to rate photographs on different qualities like patriotic or elitist or reassuring.

I have no idea what that was being used for.

And how this global industry of micro work is helping to educate a new generation of robots.

We'd like to believe that machines are capable of doing all these things on their own,

but there's really a huge human component to making a lot of this work.

That's all to come on Business Daily from the BBC.

So maybe you have a job that pays badly, or you don't have a job at all, but you have kids or sick

relatives to take care of, and you can't leave your home to do a regular 9 to 5.

You're short of cash.

What do you do?

Well, this could be one solution. Just clicking away at your

laptop or even on your smartphone. I did a job apparently training an AI paralegal program

where I had to describe a hypothetical accident that I was in and how I was injured in my own words. I did a lot of consumer

survey type work. There was one very strange job I had where I had to draw an artwork about

someone I knew who had been injured by gun violence and scan it and send it in. That's Andy Newman. He's a reporter for the New York Times.

And to research a story on this growth sector called microwork,

he spent a number of days completing these seemingly random digital tasks,

all for the mothership, Mechanical Turk.

Mechanical Turk is a digital work marketplace.

It's run by Amazon, and it's this place where people post very, very small jobs.

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