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MONDAY NOVEMBER 21 2005 10:01 AM

Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Submitted by baudot

Edited by Shal

The computer you're reading this on is smarter than you. It can perform more arithmetic in a single minute than you will in your entire lifetime. It can sort a billion item list in the time it takes you to microwave a pop-tart. It can beat you at chess.

But it can't identify a chair in a photo. It can't speak proper English. Your computer is stupider than a 5 year old.

Since their creation, people have been using computers to solve problems that people solve poorly or slowly. But what about when that problem has sub-problems that a computer solves slowly? Typically, you'd have humans solve those, then feed the answers to the computer as a prepared data set. Yesterday, Amazon.com announced the Mechanical Turk - a system for doing that on the fly, with labor taken from all over the web.

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the mechanical Turk: a chess master cleverly concealed inside.

In the Amazon system, a programmer writes code that calls the "mechanical turk" functions, which then farm the tasks out to people on the web. Anyone can go to a job listing on Amazon, and start working these tasks. Payments are small: the example tasks currently posted pay 3 cents per photo identification. Amazon takes a 10% cut of the fees, and the finished data set is returned to the program, allowing it to re-start without intervention.

It works out to a bit better than minimum wage if you go at it determinedly, and have a high-speed connection. You can log in at any hour of the day and work whatever tasks are available, for as long or as short as you like. This may be attractive to college students looking to fund their book purchases, but most likely what we'll see pretty soon are task bounties dropping to no more than the required level to attract insomniac Chinese laborers.

To try out working for The Turk, visit http://mturk.amazon.com/

Comments

BurningKrome

San Jose, CA

April 2005

NOV 21, 2005 10:17 AM

Although this is truly the beginning of the path that will supercede AI. As the ability to interconnect people through the web (and eventually directly) improves, the need for AI will be obsolete, and will be replaced by the functionality of a neural web of interconnected people to solve their complex problems.

SupremePizzaMan

Seattle, WA

September 2003

NOV 21, 2005 10:56 AM

If they're approved...I MADE 90 CENTS!

legionnaire

Belgium

November 2003

NOV 21, 2005 11:28 AM

This is very cool, it actually reminds me a bit of the approach taken in the novel Galatea 2.2 about AI where they tried the same idea.

gut666

Moreno Valley, CA

April 2005

NOV 21, 2005 11:38 AM

thats great to know i can identify simple things and speak at least some decent english than a computer which makes me a genius . take that high technology!

malkav11

Saint Paul, MN

July 2003

NOV 21, 2005 01:56 PM

It would probably help if they submitted data that actually matched the requirements.

The ones I looked at were all "select the photo that best shows this business establishment", and the photos invariably did not show the business establishment in question, or at least didn't show it well enough to identify it.

fountainofdreams

Batavia, IL

January 2005

NOV 21, 2005 02:00 PM

malkav11 said:
It would probably help if they submitted data that actually matched the requirements.

The ones I looked at were all "select the photo that best shows this business establishment", and the photos invariably did not show the business establishment in question, or at least didn't show it well enough to identify it.

yea, i was wondering about that myself.

Telltale

USA

May 2004

NOV 21, 2005 03:53 PM

BurningKrome said:
Although this is truly the beginning of the path that will supercede AI. As the ability to interconnect people through the web (and eventually directly) improves, the need for AI will be obsolete, and will be replaced by the functionality of a neural web of interconnected people to solve their complex problems.

Well fucking put.

rue_

Calgary, AB

May 2005

NOV 21, 2005 05:31 PM

I'm too slow apparently. Someone keeps stealing all the ones I click on before I hit Accept!

Longpastbedtime

Ames, IA

March 2003

NOV 22, 2005 04:25 PM

Your Stephenson is showing, BurningKrome (and your Gibson, too!).

However, I disagree. I think AI still has more promise than farming out the things that computer can't do to people. After all, we're teaching computers new tricks everyday, and we're still bound by problems we can't solve and need computers to do. Right now it's symbiotic, but our ability to program new functions far outstrips our own abilities to improve ourselves (which, as far as I know, don't exist just yet). If I may show a little Vonnegut, Tralfamadore, here we come.