mechanical turk - the artificial artificial intelligence
I read this first on golem.de and thought its a bad joke but no no - apparently Amazon wants artificial intelligence for their services really really really badly but the AI available is not good enough for them so they resort to a trick that has been used before - put a human in a machine and call it AI. The back then invention was the Chess - Turk. A machine dressed as a Turk that could play chess better then any other human on earth - later it became clear that there must have been a real human - small in size - been sitting in there. Amazon is basically doing the same thing with their MechTurk but on a grander scale - they want to make hords of jobless people their slaves by letting them solve simple puzzles - that are too complex for the machines to solve - like writing down the contents of a picture (tagging the web in effect?) or movies or - well if you are a developer and have an idea of what millions of jobless untrained real flesh drones could do for you then you can tap in with their API. In the end amazon wants to use that data to train an AI database and make all the jobless people jobless again - and many more…
Update: The Thesis behind it.
