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."

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Re:This is Amazon's Mechanical Turk system

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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.