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Friday, November 4, 2005
Amazon creates artificial artificial intelligence
Amazon.com has launched a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can’t do itself.
The name Mechanical Turk dates back to 1769, when a Hungarian nobleman created a wooden robot-like mannequin that could play chess -- even defeating chess fanatic Benjamin Franklin in Paris.
The Mechanical Turk toured around Europe to the amazement of large crowds and to the suspicion of a great many skeptics who surmised that a chess master was hiding inside. (Edgar Allen Poe even wrote an article detailing how it could be done.)
With Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon plans to supply "artificial artificial intelligence" that connect programs needing the human touch with humans, such as the simple task of identifying objects in photographs (which humans can do better than computers). Examples of what humans can do for computers? Evaluate beauty, translate text and find specific objects in photos.
"Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations," the company said. "However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs -- something children can do even before they learn to speak.
Amazon profits by collecting a fee from the developer requesting tasks for human performance -- called HITS, or human intelligence tasks. Amazon’s search engine A9.com already has used the application to cull the best photos for its BlockView pictures, which show users street-level pictures of businesses.
For more information, visit www.mturk.com.
Is this the beginning of having computers order humans around?
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