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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."

3 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --
    -mls
  2. 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".

  3. 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.