(FWIW it took a few YEARS before I was able to explain tagging and group behavior on delicious cogently. This process is not surprising.)
So, yes, it's a bit like mechanical turk. Hopefully some of the usage will be driven by participatory urges rather than getting 5c per transaction (though we will probably empower that sort of payment, and more. Offers etc.)
So if I were to give advice, I would say to have coffee with PG and give him your pitch. He's magical. Regardless, grats on the launch!
Having been to more than a few demo days myself, I think this is a much broader thing than YC cos tend to do.
"Human.io lets you to script with humans as easily as you would script with software. It does for the digital economy what the assembly line did for the industrial economy.
The software allows you to dynamically assemble ad hoc armies of virtual workers, who are then assigned to complete tasks in the real world using the sensors and input devices on their phones: GPS, camera, microphone, and so on.
Let's say you want to X. Human.io lets you..."
Still not perfect, but I think it's a little more clear than what you have.
Sample human API tasks: 1. photo scavenger hunt 2. parking garage availability 3. male to female ratio in a club 4. collect blind auction bids
I'm imagining a headline like "Things that used to be really really hard, but are easy with Human.io" and then pictures and captions describing the use cases.
(V)(°,,°)(V)That was our thinking when we first started working on human.io. If GMaps lets you invoke methods on a map, and Twilio on a phone, what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?
I think it's important to have that first, otherwise you are burying the lead. Although I can see why you wouldn't want to prematurely niche yourself, I don't think the pitch about engaging your users is especially compelling.
"what would it mean to invoke methods on a person?"
I mean ultimately you want to be selling the benefits and not the features, so I think being able to communicate the implications of that statement are much more important than being able to come up with a snappy analogy for the statement itself.
If you're really committed to staying neutral on usage though, we already have the term HCI for human-computer interaction. So maybe you could describe it as an HCI programming language or something.