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My New York Times article on “serious games”
Ever heard of Amazon’s new company, Mechanical Turk? The concept is pretty simple: You sign up as a Turk, and go to the site to see what jobs are available. The jobs all consist of some simple task that can be performed at your computer — such as viewing pictures of shoes and tagging them based on what color they are. You get a few pennies per job, and according to a recent story in Salon, some people make up to $30 a day by clicking away at these nearly-mindless tasks during slow moments at their day job.
What I love about the Mechanical Turk is that it capitalizes on an interesting limitation in artificial intelligence: Computers suck at many tasks that are super-easy for humans. Any idiot can look at picture and instantly recognize that it’s a picture of a pink shoe. Any idiot can listen to a .wav file and realize it’s the sound of a dog baring. But computer scientists have spent billions trying to train software to do this, and they’ve utterly failed.
So if you’re company with a big database of pictures that need classifying, why spent tens of thousands on image-recognition software that sucks? Why not just spend a couple grand — if that — getting bored cubicle-dwellers and Bangalore teenagers to do the work for you, at 3 cents a picture? As Amazon notes in its FAQ:
For software developers, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of building applications that until now have not worked well because they lack human intelligence. Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The Amazon Mechanical Turk web service gives developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.
Mind you, while the cognitive-science aspects of the Mechanical Turk are incredibly cool, the labor dimensions freak the hell out of high-tech labor unions. “What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer,” as one WashTech organizer argues. Either way, it’s a really odd way to think of human intelligence: Just more processing time, a few more cycles in the machine, and the global community of freelance workers a massively-parallel computer, floating out there in the aether like the world’s hugest graphics card.
I actually wrote a little essay for Wired in 2002 that predicted this, sort of.
(Thanks to Jason Fisher for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map
Should automobile software be open-sourced?
My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”
Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are already dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a misery, then, because an evil?
A. Certainly.
M. Then those who have already died, and those who have still got to die, are both miserable?
A. So it appears to me.
M. Then all are miserable?
A. Every one.
January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM
One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009
)
January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM
BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.
January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM
“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)
January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM
I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.
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