Amazon has just announced their latest service: The Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Before I explain what the service does a little history is in order …
“The Turk” was a famous hoax perpetrated in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. According to the Wikipedia article on “The Turk” the hoax consisted of a “maplewood cabinet 4 feet long by 2 feet deep and 3 feet high, with a mannequin dressed in cloak and turban seated behind it. The cabinet had doors that opened to reveal internal clockwork mechanisms, and when activated the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent.”
But that was all stage dressing and the “cabinet was a cleverly constructed illusion that allowed a chess master to hide inside and operate the mannequin. Its operation by chess masters allowed it to win the vast majority of its games.”
That is all to explain the reason why Amazon has named a new service the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Like the hoax the fact that humans actually provide a service is effectively hidden by the Web interface.
What Amazon are doing is harnessing the labor of anyone who wants to contribute their work in exchange for money — yes, real money that accumaulates in your Amazon account and can be transferred to your own bank.
What Amazon wants people to do are Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) which are tasks that humans are much better at than computers. For example (from Amazon’s MT home page), identifying whether a pizza parlor is visible in a photograph is a trivial task for a person but impossible (so far) for a computer to do.
The potential for this service to solve large scale problems where humans excel at an attractive price point is huge. By offering the service to other organizations Amazon might just create a powerful and profitable business.
