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Amazon Patents Humans Assisting Computers
theodp writes "Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary sci-fi, with claims covering the use of humans 'of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated' to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer. From the patent: 'For examples, the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' Yikes."
predict that the first post will have something to do with our new robotic overlords....
Amazon patents "using a computer".
MABASPLOOM!
Is what kind of drug is being used. Is it grass? meth? crack? or maybe shrooms? You know, there really needs to be an intervention here. This behavior is unacceptable.
SHODAN versus Amazon.
"Y-y-you wannnnnnntttttt my A-a-a-a-VVVatarrr? I-I-i-i-i-IIII am am-mu-mu-muMUUUzed-d-DDD."
predict that you will be modded down as a troll.
I've done that since the 80's.
bla
I claim the patent on the use of a fork and a spoon. Now you're all stuck using sporks!
Isn't this Luis von Ahn's thesis work?
my computer told me not to read TFA. did i miss anything?
Amazon has already deployed such a system under the name of Mechanical Turk. The idea is that humans assist computers, providing what is cutely named artificial artifical intelligence. You can read more about the concept in an article that ACM Queue run on May 2006.
--
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective
...but I couldn't help the machine because that
would be against the patent.
Charlie's Magic
This is clearly a patent for Mechanical Turk, an Amazon service that's been mentioned many times on Slashdot in the past. Whether or not this is something patentable should be up for debate, but what's so scary about it?
Next someone will try and patent 'an organic device that contracts in volume, which as a result of the contraction expells liquid, in order that the liquid carries within it, items, compounds, chemicals and other life giving nutriants to other organic structures' and then try and claim ownership of every person on the planet.
:)
But on the other hand, if they manage to succed in getting a patent for 'work', there might be a chance that most of us might have to stop working due to patent infringement
Automaker Ford was ganted the following patent: A hybrid automobile/human driving arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist an automobile to solve particular tasks, such as transporting a human, or other non-human items such as freight...
"the computer using us"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
what is unique about this? what makes this qualify as non-obvious? patents generally need to be issued to people that come up with ideas the person of average skill in the relevant field could not reasonably be expected to use. in short, why is the idea of using people to solve problems that computers either can't or are very slow/ineeficient at anything new? take google for example, their new image categorization game goes along these lines- using people's brain power to tag images- so the question is: is this patent vague enough to encompass google's game or similar ideas?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
In Soviet Russia, Computer use YOU!
Interactive proof system with a human prover == not terribly scary to me.
I can't find where, but didn't Marshall Brain say he had a patent on this sort of technology?
Your scary sci-fi scenario sounds remarkably like modern working life - refined by years of Taylorism.
...by any chance be a viable replacement for the management where I work?
Sounds like what CAPTCHA farms already do.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
In the normal course of events, machines assist people not the other way 'round. One of the greater engineering fubars of all time was a ship called the Great Eastern. It had a steam powered windlass that required the assistance of seamen because the steam couldn't quite do the job. If the steam pooped out the result was mayhem. If the system was designed to be properly steam powered or properly human powered, fewer bones would have been broken.
t ern/
I'm not sure what could go wrong with Amazon's plan but I'm sure that it will go wrong.
http://www.atlantic-cable.com/Cableships/GreatEas
welcome our french speaking, not formally educated, computer controlled underlords...
This video on Human Computation describes using humans as part of a distributed computing grid for interpretting captchas, and categorizing images.
...And they'll actually particpate, en masse -- without pay -- thinking they're just playing an online *game.*
RSS feed for this story stated
"Amazon Patents Humans Ass"
that had me rolling on the floor!
comment directly in my journal
I, for one, welcome our new, computationally efficient delegating overlords.
>... in drive A:
>
>I've done that since the 80's.
"A human never stands so tall as when stooping to help a small computer."
-- Infocom motto, from Our Circuits, Ourselves, ca. 1983
welcome our new people-using-computer-using-people overlords.
In Soviet Russia, computers use YOU!
They call it this.
;-)
But I think they have this.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I played Paranoia and all I got was sued for infringing on Amazon's intellectual property. My character was Ame-R-iCan and his mutant power was eat organic matter x 3.
It's all fun and games now but it won't be funny when the machine decides your next task is to "Give me your clothes" in an Austrian accent.
... although the thought is potentially offensive to some. Wouldn't working as a wetware computer-augmenting classifier be the perfect job opportunity for a mentally handicapped person? I mean, someone with a regular IQ would find it boring over time to tell apart cats and dogs in pictures, but it sounds like a challenge for someone who is not in possession of such faculties. And this is exactly the sort of task that is troublesome for AI, while it being trivial for even "challenged" people! Cross-check the responses, reward those who vote with the consensus, and you've got something that actually might even work as a teaching tool... and how many Down's syndrome people could say they hold a "computer job"?
Don't flame me, I'm physically disabled myself and therefore am quite familiar with the troubles disabled people of all kinds face in particular when it comes to finding meaningful employment...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Other than Amazon patenting this, it's hardly newsworthy, not even slashworthy. Anyone who's ever worked in a callcentre has already done this, and working in a callcentre is no accurate insight on education or intelligence.
Do you see what I did there?
They already do this at Target.
The employees all wear walkie-talkies and I've heard them come on with an obviously computer synthesized voice telling them a "guest" needed assistance in _____ dept. Or more team members were needed to cashier, ect requesting to know who would address the issue. And they would answer back to it just like they were acknowledging their boss's orders.
I don't see how this has a chance in hell of standing up in any reasonable court. Isn't ELIZA, the computer-based "therapist" who asks how you are feeling today, an example of this? Also, there are examples in the literature of genetic algorithms having been implemented where the fitness function is an actual manual step performed by a human, such as a biological assay. So the human performs one of the parts of the in silico "evolution" of the solution.
The computer is really just the communications device that glues it together.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Souls in the Great Machine by McCullen" is a sci-fi novel set in 4000 AD Australia in a post-apocalyptic medieval-type future. A city state secretly builds a gigantic mechanical computer whose elementary operations are assigned to (often unjustly) imprisoned human beings. The computer gives the city a huge advantage in planning, war, etc. The novel has many points of brilliance mixed in with a some cheesiness due to basing characters/cultures on present/historical stereotypes. It is a fun read. The Amazon reviews:
n ter-Trilogy/dp/0765344572
http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwi
at least based on the description.
It's nothing but "skills based routing," applied to a broader range of problems. It's like trying to patent the wheel, because you used 5 of them when building your pentacycle.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
For a slightly scarier version, try Vernor Vinge's use of focus in A Fire Upon the Deep.
Stephan
The Diamond Age had this exact concept. The multimedia computer called "The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" had people reading computer-generated text aloud, since computer-synthesized voices were/are not able to emulate human emotions.
My god, what will they patent next? An electronic book with the words "Don't Panic!"* in big letters on the cover?
(* Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
...YOU program COMPUTERS!
*sigh*
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
One of my areas of interest for my Ph.D. research is multi-agent systems. The concept Amazon is describing is so old that there's a term for it. "Human in the loop." This is where a human agent is considered to be a part of a heterogeneous multi-agent system.
I believe fellow data center tape loaders (particularly those who were employed at Acxiom) are familiar with this concept already. A user in a far away land requests information from a database via a mainframe which sends a print job to a networked printer in another room where tapes are housed and a minimum wage employee fetches the tape and loads it onto a tape reader that the mainframe reads and sends the information back to the user. Rather ridiculous. I even remember telling my coworkers they'd all be replaced by hard drives in less than a decade. I was right.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
He's
On the fromt page today:m l
"New Algorithms Improve Image Search" http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/03/1952205.sht
The algorithm is based on users providing input upon computer request to classify images.
What would you do if Mexican's where everywhere? Like if you could not look to you're left or right without seeing one dirty Mexican just waiting to give you hepatightis!
Do you think that Mexican's are taking over hour country?
Last year, billions of Mexicans illegally crossed our bordars!
I pro pose to solve the Mexicans problem Once And For All by building some giagantic huge mountans between Mexicania and America. That way, if Mexcan's want too come across the bordar, they will have too cross the mountain and deal with the likes of SARUMAN!!!
This essey will fockus on the deatail's of the solution to Mexican's. It will present arguments supporting the Mexican Barrier Act of 2009, as very good as presenting arguments from the VERY BAD OPPOSING TEAM (VBOT), the total dickheads that just wantto give every country they see to all the wetback's without asking the rest of of us first if we also wanto give our country to them first. Also, I will show why those dickheads from the VBOT are wrong and why they have no dick's even though they are dickheads!!!!!!!
Okae\y. First of all, as eye said befour, they're are dickhead's from VBOT that think Mexican's are people too and that we should just let them take over our country for no good reason at all. They like too say that Mexican's are also people and that our country should be for whoever want's too work hard save money and bee free. Also they say that our country has nothing too loose if we just let in any wetback in that we see because our country "benefits" from the "productive efforts" the wetback's make.
Well if that isn't the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard in my entire whole life anywhere in the world! Like a six-pak of Mexican's could ever dew anything but ruin our country with their ugly skin! Also they speak Mexican witch is such a stupid langwage that eye am amazed bye how stupid it is! Also they don't speak or write good English. They're skills are just to poor, just like the stupid country they came from. Go back Mexcan's!
In summary, all the Mexican's have to be gotten rid of, and we also have to build a mountan to keep them out. If every good White American acts today, we can all enshure our future will bee Mexican-free, and that in America, we speak English, not dirty Mexacan.
> they'd be the ones laughing your ass off.
:)
No, they'd be suing your ass off.
Couldn't the system be reduced to a light comes on, human presses a key, human gets cookie? With enough lights and enough cookies you could get a human to do most any computer related task.
So, if I am supplying Amazon Turk with replies for computers that the computers can't think of on their own, then who is in charge, me or the computer? :)
Does this mean I can patent humans helping humans use a computer?
You can see the type of work available for anyone to process on Amazon's Mechanical Turk right here: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false
It's things like helping categorize images or finding specific things in databases of images or inspecting contracts -- you know the kind of stuff that's really easy for humans but is really difficult for computers.
I've tried a few in the past, however, most of the available "HITs" pay only a few pennies a piece, so I'm not about to go quitting my day job to sit at home fulfilling these requests quite yet.
With a substantial portion of the whole science fiction genre available to point to as prior art this ought to be fun in court.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
shame on you,
Harinarayan; Venky (Mountain View, CA),
Rajaraman; Anand (Palo Alto, CA),
Ranganathan; Anand (Mountain View, CA)
unless, of course, the computer made you do it.
at least 90% fo the time? I know my succses rate is only lkie 60%
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
It seems to me that Fritz Lang's Metropolis would be easy to cite as prior art.
That's actually a very good idea.
~= scwizard =~
Those skilled in the art will also recognize this "invention" as being very similar to the Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders Project, which is notable for a) rocking and b) having gone online before the patent was filed.
It's to the point of insanity now—it's difficult to imagine any software you write doesn't violate a patent. Everyone just ignores them and hopes they don't get sued, with big companies relying on mutually assured destruction to keep the lawyers at bay. Is this really the type of patent system we want?
>> ... perform subtasks dispatched by a
Darn it, I am a bit late. I had planned to implement "scheduling human tasklets in O(1)" in 2.8 kernel.
I for one welcome our hybrid human assistant overlords.
To some extent, the chaos you speak of will be inflicted on people who wouldn't exist without the system you are speaking of...so what's the problem giving it a try?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I had just assumed that the OCR read the numbers wrong.
stoplights
All the Ts are crossed and each i has been dotted; it's just a matter of days until my patent will be issued, covering interstellar alien/human interaction. I'm going to be rich! Rich beyond my wildest dreams!
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Is this bad? Hard to say--maybe our new overlords know better than we how to spend society's resources. We shall see...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Why did Amazon.com file such a patent? And where does it fit into Amazon.com's current market niche. Their nick is Online Retailer.
\
It's not AI, but it doesn't have to be. Routine tasks, simple logic, productivity standards for each task, and humans controlled by voice command. http://www.voxware.com/index.php?id=dudos
In the call centre, humans are made to wear headphones with the little microphone thingy. They are strapped into chairs, and an IV is inserted into each arm, one containing a stimulant, the other a relaxant. Electrodes for measuring galvanic skin response, as well as heart monitors are attached. The central computer queues calls, and assigns them to available humans. If it is detected that a human is becoming agitated, the relaxant iv drip is opened. If the human seems too relaxed, the stimulant drip is opened. If the call queue is long, the system may bias drips in favour of stimulant, though this can be risky, as humans may totally wig out.
Ok, that might be a slight exageration. It's based on the account of a friend who worked in one. Perhaps it wasn't quite as bad as he let on.
Loose lips lose spit.
Anyone else reminded of Focus, in the novel A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge? For those who haven't read the book, one of the civilisations has developed a disease that can be manipulated to 'focus' a person, making them completely dedicated to their specialty and loyal to their masters. The book describes the interaction of computer and Focussed, and the abilities it gives to those who have access to the information they provide (perfect analysis, complete contextual information and summarization, translation, etc).
It's an interesting concept, creates almost a cyborg society, and the book delves into the moral questions of whether it's acceptable to reduce a human to the function of a computer. Not to mention it's a good story.
[clever sig]
I did not understand, and he were speaking in the blaze rose and very wide, `what a full of him, my limbs. Joe and that stuff's of his first words. `Tried to be out of it. After- wards, she beggared me. `When shall ever could make such a relief to speak (I thought I do not a moment of them, Joe came back, but another horizontal line beyond, was with both, for a reckless witness under similar circum- stances. I am indebted for it had been made Joe put straws down
(c) 2007 Nugneant's PC, with help from Markov and http://johno.jsmf.net/knowhow/ngrams/index.php. No user interference or assitance, in compliance with Amazon.com's patent.
One could go nuts on all the reasons why this should be patentable. One could argue that they are patenting project management. One can argue (quite convincingly, I think), that they are patenting software that is little different than has been used on help desks for nearly twenty years (I built some of it, so I have a pretty good idea). Most disturbing, however, is the notion that they are patenting "piecework", which has long been regarded as one of the most problematic forms of employment. This notion is only reinforced when you visit the tasks that are available on the Mechanical Turk site and the extraordinarily small payments that are offered. One individual is offering 50 cents for unique three to four paragraph blog entries. Several state agencies are offering a dime to verify fields in a contract (and one city is offering 3 cents). Its hard to imagine how anyone could earn anything close to the U.S. minimum wage at these prices. I doubt the patent will stand up to scrutiny. What I wonder is if the payment system will also fail the test of reasonableness. Amazon needs to get their act together on that. Some of the payments offered clearly fail any test of reasonableness.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Spammers started doing something very much like this shortly after captchas became popular. I don't know if they continued doing it, but for a while some porn sites were presenting captchas from other sites, asking the user to provide the answer, and then the porn site would use the user's input to respond to the captcha at the target web site.
We called it Porn-Sourcing... we would have a system for distributing manual data entry tasks to people and provide access to Porn as payment. 10 tax returns == 100MB downloads, etc.
It was a great idea until P2P killed to Porn problem... now everyone has unlimited access to Porn, why would they do work for it anymore... even if they did, they'd post in on a network and we'd lose half our workforce for the day until we got some new content they wanted.
Oh well, good luck Amazon... hope your business model is a little more fool-proof.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This sounds a lot like the Slashdot moderation system. Humans check what other humans write, then get graded on their grade. Thusly they build a karma which enables them to be read.
;)
I think we just discovered what that new image search engine is!
SCENE INT: Enter room with 300,000 East Indians with turbans sitting in cubicles in front of computer monitors
Or amazon could be getting into the concert ticket business
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen
http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwi
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Sorry, leaving now.. no need to throw things.
- Launch with a Website and completely manual back-end
- Automate some of the processes
- Automate everything but a few manual processes
- Burnout - or very occasionally Profit!
They seem to have patented stage 3.Consider "tape reel" systems prevalent in the 70's / 80's and their INSTRUCTIONS to humans to CARRY OUT TASKS to load / unload specific tapes to specific tape controllers.
--- This meme is memory intensive
This is just workflow, lots of prior art here.
Just out of college with a BS in a field that's populated only by multi-PhDs and above.
Living in Sacto, CA, I answered a job ad for computer work.
This was in Sprint's massive online data center. Here's the gig.
There's this room with a million tapes in it.
In the middle of the room are about ten tape readers.
Just outside of the tape reader area are offloading areas for tapes done being read.
The rest of the room has 10 sections of racks, each with 10 subsections, each containing 5 racks of 2000 tapes.
It was a pretty big room.
There are 4 types of tape transport machines:
1. The tape reader--accepts about dozen tapes in the top, reads the required data & spits the tape out the bottom.
2. Return tape sorter--takes tapes from the bottom of the reader and sorts them by section (1E5) and subsection (1E4)
3. Tape returner--takes a stack of tapes for a subsection (usually about 10 tapes or so), brings them to the appropriate racks and puts them back on the shelf.
4. Tape getter--retrieves from the racks a list of 10 tapes requested by a reader & puts them in the top of the reader.
Machine 1 was some sort of automated tape reader; GOFK what type (it wasn't that sort of degree)
Machines 2-4 were off-the shelf H. spaiens.
I was a machine type 3. I lasted a week.
Most new hires last under 3 days. About half never even return to get their paycheck for the 3 days.
so, remember--now matter how dull your job is--it could be worse!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."
-Benedict De Spinoza
yes, I have filed to patent a class of higher resolution, called "experts."
one of my 548 claims is that "when some person, device, or state is unable to complete a task, it will refer, defer, or pass the task to an 'expert,' which will assist, advise, complete the task, or partially work sections of the task."
why don't you all just start paying me all your money now, so I don't have to sue you all later?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In a quick scan of everyone's comments, I didn't see anyone point out that Slashdot is built on a system similar to the claim 1 in the patent. It's a long claim, but suffice it to say humans are asked to moderate and metamoderate, thereby providing additional computation capacity based on capability (karma). However, the folks at Amazon seem to not cite Slashdot as prior art. Even if they are including an element not embodied by Slashdot, that seems an oversight.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This was one of the concepts proposed in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The book made requests for voice actors when it needed to.
An accurate assessment of what this patent covers.
(1) Claims 1, 42, 58, 72, 73 and 74 are the independant claims and thus all claims in thte patent are limited by the terms in these claims.
(2) Each of these independant claims when considered as a whole limits the scope of the patent to the following applications: (speech recognition, conversion of speech into text, speech comparison, comparison of music samples)
(3) There is no other AI based tasks (such as image analysis) covered by this patent unless speech recognition, conversion of speech into text, speech comparison, comparison of music samples is also included in the task list. You can use the technology described for image comparison and not be infringing as long as you do not incorporate the independant claim tasks in your process.
Diamond Age, where humans act as speech interface (and actors) in computer games for the wealthy.
Interesting Scifi Short story along these lines: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Jump to scene where HAL is informing Bowman and Poole about a impending failure of the ship's AE-35.
The crew EVA's, retreives the EA-35 and HAL proceeds to direct the crew through the diagnosis of the unit. HAL directed both the humans and other test/measurement equipment(computers) through the diagnosis. P.S. The computer also made judgement call about the human's reliability.
I think that movie covers nearly all of the patent claims.
As for humans directing computers who then direct humans, Email covers that...
I'm just curious, but exactly what "baby steps" did you take?
As for the story, it was good, though it lost me a bit in ignoring things like entropy or the ability of computers to be automatically compatible with each other. But it was still interesting, especially in the more "near term" predictions (realities?) concerning retail management.