The Mechanical Turk
Amazon have taken the idea of outsourcing tasks at which a human outperforms a machine (eg image recognition) and building an API to a marketplace that makes these jobs available and retrieves the results. They call this the Mechanical Turk after Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1769 pseudo-mechanical chess-playing automaton. Coders can call the Mechanical Turk with a query as though it were a normal RPC request.
It’s a fascinating concept with all kinds of political ramifications I don’t want to think about right now. Read more about the technology side of it here.