Humans help out Computers
March 26th 2007 09:54
Signature Tune
International Herald Tribune brings the following good news for Human beings.
When computers need human help
By Jason Pontin
Published: March 25, 2007
Computers still do some things very poorly. Even when they pool their memory and processors in powerful networks, they remain unevenly intelligent. Things that humans do with little conscious thought, like recognizing patterns or meanings in images, language or concepts, only baffle the machines.
These lacunae in computers' abilities would be of interest only to computer scientists, except that many individuals and companies are finding it harder to locate and organize the swelling mass of information that our digital civilization creates.
The problem has prompted a spooky, but elegant, business idea: Why not use the Web to create marketplaces of willing human beings who will perform the tasks that computers cannot?
Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com, has created Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online service involving human workers, and he has also personally invested in a human-assisted search company called ChaCha. Bezos describes the phenomenon very prettily, calling it "artificial artificial intelligence."
"Normally, a human makes a request of a computer, and the computer does the computation of the task," he said. "But artificial artificial intelligences like Mechanical Turk invert all that. The computer has a task that is easy for a human but extraordinarily hard for the computer. So instead of calling a computer service to perform the function, it calls a human."
Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed. (The name recalls a famous 18th-century hoax, where what seemed to be a chess-playing automaton really concealed a human chess master.) Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages. Software could help, but algorithmically eliminating all the duplicates was impossible, according to Bezos. So the company began to develop a Web site where people would look at product pages and be paid a few cents for every duplicate page they correctly identified.
Bezos figured that what had been useful to Amazon would be valuable to other businesses, too. The company opened Mechanical Turk as a public site in November 2005. Today, there are more than 100,000 "Turk Workers" in more than 100 countries who earn micro-payments in exchange for completing a wide range of quick tasks called HITs, for human intelligence tasks, for various companies.
PriceGrabber.com, a comparison shopping site, uses Mechanical Turk to match images to the product pages. "Harnessing the power of this enormous, decentralized work force allows us to obtain images for a wide variety of items in a fraction of the time it would have taken to do it ourselves," said Sagar Jethani, director of content development and community at PriceGrabber.
Mechanical Turk's customers are corporations. By contrast, ChaCha.com, a start-up in Carmel, Indiana, uses artificial artificial intelligence - sometimes also called crowdsourcing - to help individual computer users find better results when they search the Web. ChaCha, which began last year, pays 30,000 flesh-and-blood "guides" working from home or the local coffee shop as much as $10 an hour to direct Web surfers to the most relevant resources.
Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.
Harnessing the collective wisdom of crowds isn't new. It is employed by many of the "Web 2.0" social networks like Digg and Del.icio.us, which rely on human readers to select the most worthwhile items on the Web to read. But creating marketplaces of mercenary intelligences is genuinely novel.
What is it like to be an individual component of these digital, collective minds?
To find out, I experimented. After registering at www.mturk.com, I was confronted with a table of HITs that I could perform, together with the price that I would be paid. I first accepted a job from ContentSpooling.net that asked me to write three titles for an article about annuities and their use in retirement planning. Then I viewed a series of images apparently captured from a vehicle moving through the gray suburbs of North London, and, at the request of Geospatial Vision, a division of the British technology company Oxford Metrics Group, identified objects like road signs and markings.
For all this, my Amazon account was credited the lordly sum of 12 cents. The entire experience lasted no more than 15 minutes, and from my point of view, as an occluded part of the hive-mind, it made no sense at all.
There's more to this story but I think this gives a good view of the situation.
| 74 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Mark Schultz
Evil Pleasures
Random Musings on Life, Love and Everything
Let's Get Down To Business
Still beats the fuck out of blogging on orble =D
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
katyzzz....What's a 100% increase on 0. Yes, I figured that.
Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
One has to move in the popular vogue.
katyzzz....but thanks for the visit and the info and good luck to those making the bucks.
Comment by Jessicca
Learning Something Everyday
Imagine if everything is really taken over by the computer, what are we human here for still?
It's a sad fact to think about...
But good to know hope is still there as we humans, are not God, and even though how much we try to be like God and have our creations, just be glad that the machines ain't perfect still.
Hope that one day I have plenty of time and sign up to Mechanical Turk to earn some living.
Have a blessed week ahead
Comment by Jessicca
Learning Something Everyday
Imagine if everything is really taken over by the computer, what are we human here for still?
It's a sad fact to think about...
But good to know hope is still there as we humans, are not God, and even though how much we try to be like God and have our creations, just be glad that the machines ain't perfect still.
Hope that one day I have plenty of time and sign up to Mechanical Turk to earn some living.
Have a blessed week ahead
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
katyzzz
Comment by Adrienne
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
katyzzz