Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

[da]

Imagine writing software that, say, needs to be able to identify whether a photo has Elvis Presley in it. Or whether the voice in a sound-clip is angry. Or does text recognition on scrawled handwriting. Amazon has released an API to make this possible via a web-service. So, your program calls this API (using whatever inputs you want, such as a question, or a picture) and it returns a value answer within some specified time period.

Cleverly, they named it "Mechanical Turk". It does precisely the same thing as the old-time pre-robotic chess-player, which was a fake, done with a small person hidden inside the console. When I came across this, I was convinced it was a practical joke. Like Google's pigeon-ranking algorithm from 1 April 2002. But no, this seems to be legit. People post a bounty (seems typically a penny) for others to claim by performing a "Human Intelligence Task" (as opposed to an artificial intelligence task). The requester can require particular qualifications, and they have the right to refuse bad answers.

Right now most of the questions are surveys paying a penny, though there are some transcription tasks that pay approximately $10/hr. This has fairly exciting (but scary) possibilities for outsourcing work across the globe. On the one hand, it literally puts people into an inhuman job, doing work for computers. At the same time, people have done menial jobs forever; and companies have been doing similar outsourcing over the internet for a while. This just brings it down to smaller companies, or anybody with a bit of cash and a computer program.

This development doesn't surprise me much; my ex-business-partner and I wrote a similar service in 1996, which we gave up on because we didn't have the means to make it big enough to matter. But at the same time, even though it's an obvious development, it creeps me out a bit that a big company is actually doing it.

It's also funny to me that this could directly be used to countervent "are you a human" tests.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned the last time you talked about Captchas, I really think it's funny that this is the only one of Manuel Blum's brilliant ideas that was de-fanged by globalism, of all things.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Is it really such an inhuman task, though? It's an abstract, dissociated task, sure, but frankly, it sounds about a zillion times more interesting than washing dishes or running a gas station.

I had a job editing voice files for phone-mail systems. So, so boring. It was incredibly repetitive. At least working for Mechanical Turk would give you a whole lot of variety...

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I would also wonder how interested the IRS will be...

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

I think this is my dream job. Seriously. I hear you about the sweatshop possibilities, but doing Internet scavenger hunts is one of my favourite things, especially when there are puzzles involved. I could sit in my room and eat bon-bons and surf the Internet, and get PAID FOR IT! Eventually AI will get good enough that I will be out of a job, but until then it looks like a sweet deal.