The term "mechanical turk" came from a fake 18th century chess machine. Rather than being a precursor to IBM's " Deep Blue" - a chess master was hiding in the machine.. pulling various levers.
Now the term "mechanical turk" largely points to Amazon's cloud crowd service.
The premise is simple - you upload basic tasks like "tell me when there is a human in a photograph" and I will pay you a few cents. If you process enough photos - you could achieve $6.01 an hour.
From research I have seen most "turkers" earn pocket money.... its something to do while watching the tedious X-Factor for instance.
Turkers are increasingly seen as a "big data" tool - helping to classify data - which computers still struggle with:
- Complex image classification;
- Audio Transcription etc....
It is all reasonably primitive - but also very helpful!
Companies like Google or Twitter make extensive use of the Turk - to help code real-time event - to improve search... and to train machines.
Anyway - back to my premise...
Currently a turker logs in - and processes tasks when they are chilling out (in fact I have classified quite a bit of seafloor as a turker http://www.seafloorexplorer.org/#!/classify/ground-cover) - it was kind of fun - however they never acknowledged my help (I was just expecting a bit of gamification was all!) - so I gave up.
It did make me wonder though... what if like SETI (you lend spare computer time) - we simply gave spare mental capacity.
So when faced with an important life decision - we could look to the crowd for advice...... for instance 9/10 turkers recommend you buy that new car!
No comments:
Post a Comment