Artificial Artificial Intelligence
by
Randy Mears
As I mentioned in my last post, one of Amazon’s new Web services seems interesting enough to warrant a blog entry all its own. A bizarre case of IT imitating life imitating IT, this new service, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, is billed as Artificial Artificial intelligence. The idea is that, when your application needs a human to do something, an API is available that your program can use to submit the request to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. The service then posts your HIT (Human Intelligence Task) to a Web-based list where it waits for a human to complete it. Upon completion, it is reviewed by the requestor and, if accepted, the human is then paid a predetermined, typically miniscule, fee.
With points rather than small payments as the incentive, you will find a similar much more targeted concept alive and well in Google’s image labeler. Though it is not as generic a tool, it does not expose general purpose API; it is still designed to exploit human intelligence where artificial intelligence falls short. For a reward of 100 points per validated word, you work with an invisible partner to suggest key words to be associated with random images. These keywords are then used as search tags for their associated images. I don’t know what the points are ultimately worth, if anything, but it sure is an unexpectedly addictive chore.
Finally, and not surprisingly, someone is already exploring the concept of becoming a Mechanical Turk middleman. AskForCents actually uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a delivery mechanism for its product – human answers to random questions. It is currently free of charge and will remain so until it proves itself. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see on this one.
