Artificial Artificial Intelligence for complex-dud questions

No, that subject line is not a typo - though I tend to repeat repeat myself, I'm not repeating now. Way back in 1770, a Hungarian baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built a mechanical chess-playing device that defeated everyone from Napoleon to Franklin - only that it wasn't a mechanical chess-playing device - it was a human sitting behind a mechanical chess playing device - in other words, a mechanical turk. You can read more about it here.

Roll forward to 2006, amazing Amazon.com has started a mechanical turk that has humans sitting behind their computers to figure out answers to questions that bother programmers - from the mundane to the complex - that their machines are unable to easily solve - for example, questions like where is the pinkish-yellow flower in this photograph? is an absurd question for a complex computer and a fairly dud question even for a dud human being. So Amazon.com does what Amazon.com does best. Web Services. It lets you (others) post your (their) complex-dud question online and lets others (you) solve them for dirt cheap prices like $0.01. And that for the uninitiated is not artificial intelligence but artificial artificial intelligence. Go and post your own HITs (or Human Intelligence Tasks - huh?) here and get your life's complex-dud questions answered.

Prologue: If I sounded cynical, may be I just wanted to but I'm pretty kicked about it!