Amazon.com has announced the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta. Basically they’ve created a software API (Application Programming Interface) to distribute work requests that people perform better than computers. Marty Kearns describes it as a Network-centric work service. There are lots of things humans do better than computers. Imagine paying the world to help you do heavy data lifting efficiently. Have you heard of the SETI@home project where people donate their computers spare power to find aliens? Imagine that scalling to do lots of different projects accross the entire world!
I’d like to see the AMT used for a audio and video transcription and translation service. In a relatively short amount of time we could have lots of text to search and sort that was beforehand locked away. What could this mean to politics? How about equal information access to the disabled? It could bring about radical transparency in broadcast media!
Mechanical Turk can’t solve everything
I like it when I see Web 1.0 companies rollout new and innovative services. Last week, Amazon launched a new service, Mechanical Turk. According to their about pages, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ’solves the problem of building applications …