Welcome to the machine
If you thought breeding humans to be biological power sources, as in The Matrix, was a ludicrious concept, well, you're right, it made no sense at all, even if it made for great drama.
However, imagine you have an idea for a new product or service, but for the business model to work, you need to process terabytes of data in some sophisticated manner that no computer algorithm can manage. For example, categorizing music files by genre, or determining whether a short story is a comedy or romance, or analyzing photos for content (say, does this picture show a teddy bear or Carrot Top?)
The old school way to solve this problem would be to scale back your business, or wait for computers to get faster, or hope that some genius at Carnegie Mellon comes up with the next breakthrough in AI. The Web 2.0 way is to get the Internet hordes to do the job for you.
Wikipedia, del.icio.us and technorati are all examples where 'the power of the computer internet' is really the people that contribute to it. These sites are incredibly useful, but they're too haphazard and democratic for a business to exploit as a computing machine. The community at large decides what is worth talking about and what is not.
The more direct approach is to pay people to process your data, as Amazon.com is doing now. I first learned about this development at Slashdot. Amazon's new beta project, dubbed Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is a system that offers micropayments (a few cents) to people willing to carry out simple tasks (simple for humans that is). It's named after an 18th century hoax, where a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen demonstrated a clockwork cabinet that could play chess. His 'invention' enraptured audiences across Europe, but the secret was a real live chess master hidden within the cabinet.
I let Amazon's system pick my brain for a short while last week. What I found fascinating is that most of the jobs (they call them HITs for Human Intelligence Tasks) were posted by Amazon to support their A9 mapping service. Amazon has dispatched vans throughout major U.S. cities, photographing everything in sight, correlating the photos with their location via GPS. To take the service to the next level, they want to correlate the photos to specific businesses along the route. That's where the Mechanical Turk comes in. A typical HIT presents the human (user isn't quite the correct term here) with four or five pictures taken in close proximity, and asks the human to identify which picture is, for example, best representative of the Starbuck's at that address.
Sounds like it could be fun and easy, but I quickly grew bored with the game. Many of the HITs ask you to identify a business that would have no visible street presence anyway, such as a consulting firm. The chances that you can successfully answer those are slim. Amazon will have to be lucky to pair the HIT with a person who already knows about that particular business and location.
The subtitle of Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Artificial artificial intelligence. Nice to know your place in the world.
However, imagine you have an idea for a new product or service, but for the business model to work, you need to process terabytes of data in some sophisticated manner that no computer algorithm can manage. For example, categorizing music files by genre, or determining whether a short story is a comedy or romance, or analyzing photos for content (say, does this picture show a teddy bear or Carrot Top?)
The old school way to solve this problem would be to scale back your business, or wait for computers to get faster, or hope that some genius at Carnegie Mellon comes up with the next breakthrough in AI. The Web 2.0 way is to get the Internet hordes to do the job for you.
Wikipedia, del.icio.us and technorati are all examples where 'the power of the computer internet' is really the people that contribute to it. These sites are incredibly useful, but they're too haphazard and democratic for a business to exploit as a computing machine. The community at large decides what is worth talking about and what is not.
The more direct approach is to pay people to process your data, as Amazon.com is doing now. I first learned about this development at Slashdot. Amazon's new beta project, dubbed Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is a system that offers micropayments (a few cents) to people willing to carry out simple tasks (simple for humans that is). It's named after an 18th century hoax, where a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen demonstrated a clockwork cabinet that could play chess. His 'invention' enraptured audiences across Europe, but the secret was a real live chess master hidden within the cabinet.
I let Amazon's system pick my brain for a short while last week. What I found fascinating is that most of the jobs (they call them HITs for Human Intelligence Tasks) were posted by Amazon to support their A9 mapping service. Amazon has dispatched vans throughout major U.S. cities, photographing everything in sight, correlating the photos with their location via GPS. To take the service to the next level, they want to correlate the photos to specific businesses along the route. That's where the Mechanical Turk comes in. A typical HIT presents the human (user isn't quite the correct term here) with four or five pictures taken in close proximity, and asks the human to identify which picture is, for example, best representative of the Starbuck's at that address.
Sounds like it could be fun and easy, but I quickly grew bored with the game. Many of the HITs ask you to identify a business that would have no visible street presence anyway, such as a consulting firm. The chances that you can successfully answer those are slim. Amazon will have to be lucky to pair the HIT with a person who already knows about that particular business and location.
The subtitle of Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Artificial artificial intelligence. Nice to know your place in the world.
posted by RoverDaddy @ 5:30 AM
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