« The all-seeing eye | Main | Search is a commodity (again) »
HITs for HAL
November 04, 2005
Amazon.com has out-googled Google with its creepily brilliant Mechanical Turk service, a means of embedding human beings in software code. If you're writing a program that requires a task that people can do better than computers (identifying buildings in a photograph, say), you can write a few lines of code to tap into the required human intelligence through Mechanical Turk. The request automatically gets posted on the Turk site, and people carry out the Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, for a fee set by the programmer, with Amazon taking a commission.
As Amazon explains, this turns the usual computer-human interface on its, uh, head:
When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?
I have no clue how useful Mechanical Turk will prove immediately, but Philipp Lenssen (who foresaw the service in a remarkable post earlier this year) thinks the "potential is immense." Certainly, the implications are mind-bending. In an essay I discussed last week, George Dyson described how the Internet provides a platform, or operating system, that enables computers to harness and learn from the work of people: "Operating systems make it easier for human beings to operate computers. They also make it easier for computers to operate human beings." Google uses this capacity implicitly by basing its search engine on human actions and decisions - as we make our daily strolls through the Web, Google gets smarter. Amazon's Mechanical Turk uses the capacity explicitly, turning people into a "human layer" in software.
But let's not get too comfortable in our new role. No one, after all, is indispensable.
Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
Nick's next book:
Nick's latest book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
Nick's first book:
Order from Amazon
Visit book site