Amazon has a new web service which they call Mechanical Turk, after a fake chess playing robot from the 18th century.
Amazon describes it like this:
Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.
Most of the task available for completion today involve looking at a set of streetscape photographs and picking the one that is the best picture of a specified business. For completing such a task, you can earn 3 cents.
For the more ambitious, you can help Amazon re-catalog the automotive parts they sell, earning 40 cents for re-writing the title and bullet points for a custom license plate holder or a exhaust tube extension.
At first I was intrigued by this. Interesting use of technology. (There's even an API for it: hey, I could use Mechanical Turk tasks as a captcha for blog comments, and readers would earn money for me...) Free market goodness. And as Amazon says:
Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.
What's not to like?
Then I noticed Amazon's subtitle for the Mechanical Turk service: "Artificial Artificial Intelligence". That seems a little creepy. Reducing humans to cheap computing power. But don't think I'm reading too much into this. Here are two paragraphs from the FAQ:
When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.
I don't know if I'm more disturbed by the philosophical implications of this Matrix-lite inversion of control, by the commodification of intelligence it represents, or by the implications for workers rights. A system like this will just accelerate the race to the bottom: even offshore worker's jobs won't be safe. Heck, they could probably train pigeons to do some of the image recognition tasks they're currently paying 3 cents for. 3 cents probably buys a lot of pigeon pellets.
I'm not qualified to really critique Mechanical Turk the way it needs to be critiqued. Perhaps former O'Reilly editor Steve Talbot will write about it in his wonderful NetFuture newsletter.
Mechanical Turk is still a beta service. I hope it fails.
