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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!
I've done that since the 80's.
bla
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
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...
Just read Marshall Brain's take on the future if a system like Mechanical Turk became the standard for Management in US corporations.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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
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.
I claim the patent on the use of a fork and a spoon. Now you're all stuck using sporks!
That's ok, I already hold a patent on chewing food before swallowing it. So if you want people to actually make any use of the fork and spoon, I suggest you pay me royalties. A billion dollars should do it. That way if you don't pay up, I can always sue google.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
>... 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.
life giving nutriants
Sorry there's a spelling mistake in your patent. Please try again later.
The Grammar Nazi (pat pending).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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
...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!
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.
> 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?
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.
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."
LOL. I don't think I have seen MUD drunk in a while... I should go log into some of my old stomping grounds (heck, should probably check to see if they even still exist).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
I think their patent has lots of prior art. At least I've seen messages like "Please insert disk #2" quite often. And what is that, if not humans assisting computers (after all, one could also imagine an automatic disk switcher attached to the computer, in which case the computer wouldn't need to aks for human assistance for changing disks).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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
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.
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?
So far? Creating a Paypal account, a webpage, and selling somewhere between 3 and 10 shares of stock at $10 a share, for which the only thing investors will get for sure is a PDF with their e-mail, shipping address, and stock number for each share purchased.
When that gets to 250 shares sold, I'll take the next step- upping the share price to $1000, and creating a non-profit corporation to own the investment fund, and actually invest in some companies that are working on such technologies. If that investment fund grows to $100,000 (either with stock sales or actual investments) I'll take the next step of looking into combining the technology into automated retail outlets, and investing in those. If the fund ever hits $1,000,000,000 in net worth, then the next step is to start buying up land that has natural resources but for some reason or other isn't profitable to extract those natural resources with human labor. As well as picking a city site for the headquarters. If the fund ever actually builds the city AND has enough robotic labor to build the utopia, at that point the fund will hire detectives to track down stockholders and their heirs- and offer them citizenship, at the rate of one person per share of stock. Other people can still buy their way in of course, and for those who don't want to join at that point, stock can be transfered to other people.
That's the basic concept in a nutshell.
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.
How did the story ignore entropy? That's something I missed.
As for the compatibility, well, that will come when you have an AI smart enough to do it's own Enterprise Data Interchange algorithims- which aren't exactly the most complex thing in the world to come up with. Import an Excel Spreadsheet into Access using the built in wizard in Office 2007 and you'll see the start of that.
But it was still interesting, especially in the more "near term" predictions (realities?) concerning retail management.
Those predictions are the important part to me. But I still have a problem with the timeline in the story- I personally think we have a century or two before corporate and government computers join to the point where a blacklisted employee will be automatically rendered over to welfare. I hope anyway. My baby steps won't be much good otherwise- you can't build a utopia without a much larger amount of AI, and you can't build the utopia if all the land is already bought up by the narrowing upper class.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
True, nothing is infinite. Though I'd point out the story barely covers a single century (hinted at by the first person narrator living only a single lifetime)- far to short for entropy to be a problem- and includes two major forms of population control, contraceptives in the food of those in terrafoam, and nearly perfect virutal sex being available to those in The Australia Project (some would say this later is already begining to come into existance in some of the more X-rated areas of the online game Second Life). Nowhere does it say that The Australia Project will truly go on forever; if anything, entropy is just delayed (as opposed to being eliminated) by recycling and the reduced resource usage of those who choose to live entirely in VR.
As for The Oregon Project- the point is to set up an infrastructure that handles the transistion from labor scarcity to labor surplus- not solve all the world's woes at once.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.