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Amazon Patents Humans Assisting Computers

Posted by kdawson on from the mechanical-turk dept.

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."

8 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. is this even patentable by wizardforce · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

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    Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
  2. Re:This is Amazon's Mechanical Turk system by mls · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mod parent up

    On the "Data Improvement" front, I implemented something like this maybe 5 or 6 years ago. The company had a workforce of "lower" cost data entry staff, and when volumes of data came in over the web, we validated what we could programmitically, then routed questional records to human staff for cleanup and use in building a dictionary of sorts that made our automated process better. It was more cost effective to go this hybrid computing route than to throw lots of "expensive" programming at it.

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    -mls
  3. Bad engineering by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    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/GreatEast ern/

  4. Prior art, anyone? by duffetta · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:This is not a troll... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ... although the thought is potentially offensive to some.

    There's a lot of people out there who want to be offended and are looking for ways to be offended. Why? It's a form of bullying, IMHO. They want a reason to order you to change behavior. And when you ask them why they are offended, they give some half-ass answer. It's just a power trip.

    Sorry about your handicap and I'm sorry you had to mention it so that you wouldn't be modded "Troll" or "Flamebait".

  6. Why is this scary? by Gordo_1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:I for one... by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Huge breakthrough my ass. All you gotta do is give the system a way to measure the performance of workers and datamine for protocol changes that result in better performance. There's been dozens of systems made by college students that do exactly this.

    I conclude that the whole Manna story is rather implausible and a gratuitous scare attempt. No, it's a story for purposes of entertainment and philosophical reflection.. but yes, you do have to get more than half way through it before you can appeciate the message.
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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  8. Re:This is Amazon's Mechanical Turk system by smallpaul · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The idea is that humans assist computers, providing what is cutely named artificial artifical intelligence.

    You can spin this as "humans assisting computers" but you can just as easily think of it as humans doing work in a workflow dictated by computers. This idea is very, very, common. I mean a call-center is just a place where humans "help" computers to answer questions from other humans. And an IT support system is a place where humans "help" computers to solve the IT problems of other humans. Amazon has a workflow system paired with an odd job market. It's innovative and cool but its not "artificial artificial intelligence."