Harnessing the collective wisdom of crowds isn’t new. It is employed by many of the “Web 2.0” social networks like Digg and Del.icio.us, which rely on human readers to select the most worthwhile items on the Web to read. But creating marketplaces of mercenary intelligences is genuinely novel.

What is it like to be an individual component of these digital, collective minds?

To find out, I experimented. After registering at www.mturk.com, I was confronted with a table of HITs that I could perform, together with the price that I would be paid. I first accepted a job from ContentSpooling.net that asked me to write three titles for an article about annuities and their use in retirement planning. Then I viewed a series of images apparently captured from a vehicle moving through the gray suburbs of North London, and, at the request of Geospatial Vision, a division of the British technology company Oxford Metrics Group, identified objects like road signs and markings.

For all this, my Amazon account was credited the lordly sum of 12 cents. The entire experience lasted no more than 15 minutes, and from my point of view, as an occluded part of the hive-mind, it made no sense at all.

I was also interested in learning what it was like to be a consumer of crowdsourcing. So at 2:40 p.m. on March 14, I asked ChaCha, “Who was Evelyn Waugh’s commanding officer in the Commandos during World War II?” In an instant-messaging window, CandieSue22087 immediately welcomed me to ChaCha and asked me to be patient.

At 2:44, CandieSue threw up her virtual hands and transferred me to another guide, Tressie57635, who referred me to an academic paper on “suffixal sound symbolism in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.” When I protested, Tressie complained that it was a hard search, and at 2:49 she gave up, typing that I might do better with yet another guide. When I agreed, Tressie accidentally ended the search altogether — but not before serving me a page of 12 search results, not one of which was relevant.

A quick search on Google quickly provided the right answer.

THERE have been two common objections to artificial artificial intelligence. The first, confirmed by my own experiences searching on ChaCha, is that the networks are no more intelligent than their smartest members. Katharine Mieszkowski, writing last year on Salon.com, raised the second, more serious criticism. She saw Mechanical Turk as a kind of virtual sweatshop. “There is something a little disturbing about a billionaire like Bezos dreaming up new ways to get ordinary folk to do work for him for pennies,” she wrote.

The ever-genial Mr. Bezos dismisses the criticism. “MTurk is a marketplace where folks who have work meet up with folks who want to do work,” he said.