Long have doomsday soothsayers predicted a future end of civilization at the hands of machines. Little did they know that as soon as 2005 we humans would be working hard to accelerate the process.
A new service from Amazon, The Mechanical Turk, currently running in BETA, heralds the dawn of a new era when humans work for machines, completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITS) on behalf of software and developers. Here's how it works.
While computers are very good at tasks like crunching algorithms and processing vast quantities of data in milliseconds, the limits of artificial intelligence are such that some very simple human tasks are nearly impossible for machines to complete. Like for example identifying if there is a school in a photograph, or if the business on the corner is a pizza joint or a strip club (all right that one can sometimes be hard for us as well). That's where we humans can help the machines out. We have the ability to quite easily identify contextual information in pictures and feed it to computers.
I signed up for the Mechanical Turk and it assigned me a number of HITS that included typing the album name of records by looking at pictures of the record sleeves and looking at some photos of streets in Nebraska to determine which one most accurately showed a particular business address. The tasks were extremely simple and monotonous, like stuffing envelopes. But by sending my findings back to the owners of those HITS I enabled them to complete tasks that would have been excessively costly and time consuming for computers to address.
Intriguingly the inspiration behind the name of the online service as quoted on the Amazon site is the invention in 1769 by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen of a mechanical chess playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced (see also Ajeeb, Mephisto, El Ajedrecista, Deep Blue) :
"A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's 'Turk' was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the mechanical Turk: a chess master cleverly concealed inside."
So one can only guess that the analogy is that by humans completing the mundane tasks on the site for which they get paid between $0.02 and $0.03 per HIT we are the chessmasters and the software is the big hairy Turk. Only it seems the other way around. With us grunting and groaning in our furry suits as we repeat actions over and over again and the software chuckles from the controls, itself the chessmaster.
We can imagine how these types of services will impact the developing world where it may make economic sense to load up a room full of computers with workers making $1/day in virtual sweatshop environments, completing the virtual envelope stuffing for crafty and opportunistic slavemasters. Naturally the more HITS humans create accurately the more valuable their contributions become and pay rates nudge fractionally up. You can visit the site to create your own HITS as a developer or sign up to complete them and pay for your PhDs or whatever. Hmmm. If you complete 1,000 HITS a day that's $20. Too bad my tuition is $25,000/year. That's a lot of record covers and non-descript suburban streets. Maybe leave it to the sweatshops.
See also on the Chris Brauer Media Project:
