Amazon is making good use of an idea I've had too, and have been cooking up since 1995: Since humans are better than computers at many tasks, we should make it as easy to use humans as it is to use computers. Amazon Mechanical Turk "provides access to a vast network of human intelligence with the efficiencies and cost-effectiveness of computers. Oftentimes, the cost of establishing a network of skilled people to do the work outweighs the value of completing it."
Such ideas come naturally to one who has studied artificial intelligence, whose algorithms are inspired by real-life problem-solving in nature and in society, which has added its own wisdom, and which now can "honor its father and mother" by sending home some of the fruits of its labor to their proud "grandparents."
This site recruits people to transcribe podcasts. It's similar to an idea I had in June 2004, to organize the students in a class to create an audio version of the textbook used in the class.
Another idea I cooked up between fall 2002 and spring 2004 was to recruit people to interpret medical journal articles and codify them in formal computer language that is computable; this is related to "text mining" work being done in biomedical informatics. On March 25 of 2005, another guy published published the same underlying idea.
Technology is always a double-edged sword and the wisdom is in which way to swing it. To use it in favor of localism, Mechanical Turks must permit one to find Nearish talent!
What we are talking about here is essentially better Yellow Pages to reduce search cost. The less time we spend searching for what we want, the better off everyone will be. Yes, Professor Beals, making the search more convenient reduces the meaning of the search, but the personal interaction at the end of the search is even more meaningful.
No comments:
Post a Comment