In the film The Matrix, humanity is enslaved by a vast network of smart computers that uses human beings as batteries.

It’s a grim view of the future, but a future that might be starting right now. A new service from Amazon gives the impression of operating with artificial intelligence software but in fact it relies on human brain power.

The online retailer’s Mechanical Turk service puts people to work on digital chores that today’s computers struggle to handle, such as categorising information, answering questions and translating text. A good example is Amazon’s iPhone application: users can take a photo of a product — a coffee machine or a pair of headphones, for example — using the phone’s camera, and receive back a link from Amazon enabling them to buy the product.

This feat is not achieved by clever image recognition software but by real people, all over the world, looking at the photo online, searching Amazon’s database for the product and inputting the web address. If they get it right, Amazon pays them 10 cents (about 7p).

Another example of work on offer through Amazon is helping to identify pictures of fish and reptiles for a second online database. It pays five cents a time. Amazon’s service at www.mturk.com is named after a famous chess-playing automaton that dazzled Europe in the 18th century. Although supposedly a clockwork grandmaster, the Turk in fact housed a highly skilled human chess player inside its casing.

Amazon is not alone in putting the work-needy in touch with clients. Another meagrely paid online job is “mining”. Geeks in need of cash earn a small return by playing through the humdrum levels of online games to reach a stage at which a fee-paying client can buy the rewards (virtual money, weaponry, superhero powers).

Hundreds of companies are now offering tens of thousands of mini-jobs — or human intelligence tasks, if you work at Amazon — with payments of often just a few cents each. There are no qualifications required or interviews to pass, meaning that anyone with a computer and web connection can start earning in seconds.

You may think the rewards are dismal, but there are dozens of countries where a few dollars a day is a living wage. During the 1990s, the US outsourced many low-paying manufacturing jobs that Americans didn’t want to do. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and other services like it, go one step further, farming out dull, repetitive tasks to home workers and the new drones of the digital economy. Could the age of the virtual sweatshop be dawning?