As noted by Slashdot, Amazon.com was on March 27 granted a broad patent for computer systems that incorporate human beings into automated data processing – the type of cybernetic arrangement that underpins the company’s Mechanical Turk service. With Mechanical Turk, a software programmer can write into a program a task that is difficult for a computer to do but easy for a person to carry out, such as identifying objects in photographs. At the point in the program when the “human input” is required, the task is posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website where people carry it out for a small payment. The human input is then funneled back to the computer running the program.

The patent, as Amazon describes it, covers “a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist a computer to solve particular tasks, allowing the computer to solve the tasks more efficiently.” It specifies several applications of such a system, including speech recognition, text classification, image recognition, image comparison, speech comparison, transcription of speech, and comparison of music samples. Amazon also notes that “those skilled in the art will recognize that the invention is not limited to the embodiments described.”

The patent, which reads like an instruction manual from a dystopian future, goes into great detail about how the system might work in evaluating the skills and performance of the “human operated nodes.” The system might, for example, want to classify the human workers according to whether they are “college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, [or] not formally educated.” It also lays out an example of the system incorporating “multiple humans” to carry out a particular subtask, “each of the humans being identified as being capable of satisfying at least some of the associated criteria for the [subtask],” and then synthesizing a result from their combined inputs.

The patent would appear to be a brilliant hedging strategy by Amazon. There may come a time when humans are so busy carrying out menial tasks for computer systems that they have neither the time nor the money to buy books and other goods online. If so, Amazon can still look forward to earning hefty licensing fees on its patented system, which could emerge as the central engine of the post-human economy.