Artificial Artificial Intelligence

What a great term! Amazon has launched Amazon Mechanical Turk, which kind of reminds me of Google Answers (great but not a billion dollar business so Google doesn’t scale it up), though a bigger idea. While Google Answers is really when people have a question that computers have a hard time answering, Mechanical Turk provides a web service where your app can send stuff that only people can answer, and people do answer.

There are still some things that a human needs a few seconds for and a computer would never fully make it. “Is there a dog in this picture.” is very easy for a human but very hard for a computer. Make that the race of the dog and it gets even harder. I presume that Mechanical Turk has been built just because they can, and they have something like this internally. There is another service within the Amazon WebService for example where you can simply send something to a queue that Amazon manages.

Currently Mechanical Turk is under heavy load and doesn’t really work, but we will see how it takes off.