There is a Bizweek article about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com’s "Mechanical Turk" which aspires to be a platform for "human intelligence tasks". There is huge potential here… but… why Amazon? I have trawled around and can’t really seem to place my finger on why here, why now (apparently Mechanical Turk has been up for a year which I didn’t notice). I guess Amazon wants a hand in the competition for the *new* web platforms. Microsoft and Google are battling it out right now without any *real* competitors to speak of.
As I read about mechanical turk and browsed through some of the HITs on the website, I thought about the potential for MFI/micro enterprise in developing nations. SMEs will be able to outsource mini-tasks to people across the world. The only barrier I see that presents itself is contextual-awareness and tacit understanding of the task that needs to be accomplished before any contractual agreement. But then again, if the costs are so low, and the tasks so granular, maybe this won’t be a big issue– People are willing to take a risk to see if they’ll get back something that solves their immediate need.
When I talked about this with a friend, she brought up exploitation as a potential threat. Without dropping Sachs’ philosophy - the more sweatshops, the better - I agree that there is a potential for exploitation but the nature of "knowledge work" is that its far less strenuous than manual labor. Providing an alternative is important– Personal choice in vocation precedes freedom and better working conditions.
* As a sidenote, Amazon is trading at an extremely high P/E: 57.74 at the time of this blog post. Holy moly.
0 Responses to “Artificial Artificial Intelligence (Mechanical Turk)”