One recent morning, while contemplating writing this column, I scrolled through thousands and thousands of listings for mundane microgigs on Mechanical Turk, or Mturk, a decade-old platform created by Amazon. On Mturk, which advertises paid “human intelligence tasks,” I could review and correct transcriptions. I could tag images, perform a Google search, write a few sentences on a given topic, rate jokes or list items found on a receipt. For each, I would make a nickel or a quarter.

Computers are great at rote, simple tasks. This, of course, has wreaked havoc on all sorts of jobs throughout our economy. Robots have replaced countless machinists and garment workers. Kayak and Priceline, among others, have all but crowded out travel agents. Auto­mated scanning systems are slowly phasing out the checkout clerk, while Tesla is hoping to sell its zippy plug-in cars straight to customers, eliminating the salesman. (And soon those cars might drive themselves.) Mturk and its competitors, like CrowdSource, are intended for the menial jobs that still require a flicker of human intelligence and that computers can’t replicate, like deciding whether a photograph is safe for work or understanding a thick, slang-laden accent.

The platform has prompted much consternation for being a sort of outsourcing service that drives down wages. Estimates of hourly earnings generally come out to $5 or less, or around two-thirds of the current federal minimum wage — a good-enough sum, perhaps, for the India-based workers who supply about half the labor on the site but not so much for the other half who are based in the United States. More than one commentator has described Mturk as a “digital sweatshop.”

But even more troubling is the fact that crowdsourcing platforms are hurrying along the automation of more and more of these tasks. Erik Brynjolfsson, a co-author of the popular book “Race Against the Machine,” cites image recognition as one obvious place where humans have helped robots replace them. Crowdworkers can collect pennies for identifying adorable cats in photographs, and then companies take that data and improve software that identifies adorable cats with a marginal cost that approaches zero. “We’re at a real inflection point in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Brynjolfsson said. “Things are speeding up.”