User:Laurier Rochon/notes/mechanicalturk

Just a few thoughts on AWS's Mechanical Turk

This is the official description given by Amazon for its service :

"Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.

While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers—and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible."

Some things I find interesting here :

• "a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence"
• "Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications"
• "Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective"
• Human Intelligence Tasks = "HITs"

Turk > project?

I had been curious about this Mturk for a while, I had been actually quite impressed with the fact that Amazon would even venture into such territory. After all, this service is listed last, all alone in its category on the main AWS services site. I checked it out and surely, most of the work offered on there is either surveys needing to be filled out, links to be clicked or articles to be (re)written for blogs and/or SEO bs. While the tasks seem pretty mind-numbing, I was expecting to find much more spammy/unsavory activities on there. It even turned out after a bit of researching, that most of the "Turkers" are actually from the USA, and just do this kind of stuff because they're bored or need a bit of money. I was expecting most of the workforce to be from 3rd-world countries, but perhaps some of the tasks are just too difficult or culturally grounded in a north american mindset (i.e. : write a blog post about behavioral advertising, in english - this has to be approved by the "demander").

Still, I see here great potential for a self-feeding machine, or some kind of russian doll contraption as people on computers, work at tasks that computers can't do by themselves. I'm not quite sure how this fits into a larger consumer/industry/government scheme (or if it's useful to see it in that light anyways), but I'll put this one on the ice for now...