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."

Comments

I for one...

[oskay]

predict that the first post will have something to do with our new robotic overlords....

Re:I for one...

[njfuzzy]

How can you make a post predicting the first post?

Re:I for one...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Welcome to Manna. Come to my journal if you want to invest in The Oregon Project, just in case....

In other news

[neoform]

Amazon patents "using a computer".

Re:In other news

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It's just Manna. Or at least, the bare bones beginings of an automated management program that could take the retail and manufacturing sectors by storm...soon every teenager will be wearing a headset with a button to hit to acknowledge the order or completion of a task.

Insert disk...

[muffel]

... in drive A:

I've done that since the 80's.

This is Amazon's Mechanical Turk system

[Diomidis Spinellis]

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

Re:This is Amazon's Mechanical Turk system

[mls]

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.

In other news..

[pak9rabid]

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...

Re:So What?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Just read Marshall Brain's take on the future if a system like Mechanical Turk became the standard for Management in US corporations.

Could an invention like this...

[plams]

...by any chance be a viable replacement for the management where I work?

RSS said "ASS"

[emptybody]

RSS feed for this story stated

"Amazon Patents Humans Ass"

that had me rolling on the floor!

Re:RSS said "ASS"

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that if they had patented it, you'd be the one rolling on the floor, but they'd be the ones laughing your ass off.

AI?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

They call it this.

But I think they have this. ;-)

Re:AI?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And I think they have invented This, which is even more scary.

They'll be back!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is not a troll...

[CptPicard]

... 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...

Re:This is not a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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".

Re:This is not a troll...

[StikyPad]

This would be perfect if it could be done from home.

And my 5-year-old would be happy because he'd get to play "games" as much as he wanted.

"Is it bedtime yet?"

"I SAID CLICK ON THE DOGS!!!"

Already done

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:Already done

[Manchot]

I think you're looking too much into this. I worked at Target during high school, and what you heard is far less sinister than you believe it to be. The computer telling the "team members" that a "guest" needs assistance is triggered by a customer picking up one of the service phones peppered throughout the store. The reason that the employees try to respond so quickly is that the phones have something written on them to the effect of "A team member will be with you within the next x minutes," and people get angry if you're not there fast enough.

As for the "Additional cashiers to the front lane," that is actually triggered by the cashiers themselves via a button on their registers. Typically, the manager up front would just call for backup directly if there was a sudden wave of customers, but on occasion, the manager would be busy elsewhere. In that case, one of the cashiers could just press the button without stopping (i.e., slowing down) to do it manually. More practically, the cashiers aren't given walkie-talkies because the collective noise from ten nearby walkies would be disruptive to the customers. Also, the phones at each lane were tied into the walkie system, but it didn't work very well, and it was just easier to push the button.

Probably the worst computer-control issue at Target was the "speed score" system. Basically, after every transaction, they'd assign you a score (either G for green, or R for red), indicating whether you were fast enough on that transaction. Your overall scores were then tabulated on a monthly basis. When I first started, you wouldn't know your score on an individual customer, and you could only know your monthly average. Being a 17-year-old, I tried to get the highest score possible, and I did pretty well (something like best average in the store for six months). However, about halfway through my tenure there, they switched to a system that showed you your score after each customer, which soon led me to see how flawed it actually was. You see, I quickly figured out that if not for the customers themselves, I would have gotten a G on every transaction. The problem was that the system basically worked by assigning every item an allowed scan time (so a thing of dog food might be 30 seconds, while a pencil might be 5 seconds). From what I could tell, it also allowed a certain amount of time for payment. What I noticed is that as long as there were a few items (about four or more), I would always get a G, no matter what. When it came down to just a couple of items, I would often get a R. Why? As it turned out, the customer would squander my allowed time by taking a long time to figure out the machine that Target uses for credit and debit cards. In the end, the only effect that speed scores had on me was to get me angry at the people I was supposed to be serving. Yes, you heard that right: I would get a little mad at people for not being efficient enough.

Re:Eh?

[twitter]

Interactive proof system with a human prover == not terribly scary to me.

Yeah, but a patent on it is. Even more scary is a patent on a program that really just prompts the user for input.

Re:is this even patentable

[mindwhip]

We have a very obvious prior art right here staring us all in the face... the moderation system on /.

There is no way a computer (at this time) could actually rate posts as off-topic, funny etc so people (of various educational backgrounds) are assigned by the computer to process the information and return the result to the computer. This is then verified by others doing the same thing, as well as meta moderated and all the other bits that go into who gets selected to get mod points in the future.

Gratz Amazon on patenting the /. moderation system...

Why is this scary?

[Gordo_1]

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.

Re:Prior Art

[QuantumG]

Oh boy. I tell ya. The concept of patent clearly isn't part of the education system.

Imagine I invent a new kind of lawn mower. I file a patent to protect my invention for 20 years so I can commercialize it without having to worry about the existing lawn mower companies snapping up my invention and beating me to market. What's the title on the patent going to be? That's right:

"A mechanism for the automated trimming of grass."

In the patent I will describe how the mechanism works. What prior art there has been in automatted trimming of grass, why my invention is novel and how hard/easy it is to manufacture.

So will get posted to Slashdot about it?

"Man Patents Lawnmower."

Then everyone will have a bit of a moan about how the patent office doesn't know what they're doing anymore and maybe they'll quote a few lines from the patent where I'm outlining what a lawnmower is with the intention of claiming that this is what I am patenting.