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A Non-Techie Looks at Mechanical Turk
December 10th, 2007 by KateLet me start off stating that I’m the administrative assistant here at Beaconfire, and an unlikely candidate to write a tech blog. With that in mind, let me tell you what I know about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
In 1769, a Hungarian fellow by the name of Wolfgang von Kempelen created a life-sized robot that could kick your butt at chess. It kicked Benjamin Franklin??s butt; are you trying to tell me that you think you??re better at chess than Ben Franklin? The invention was commonly known as ??The Turk,? on account of his thick (Turkish looking?) mustache and turban. How did this early model of artificial intelligence work, you ask incredulously? Well, von Kempelen crammed a guy who was really good at playing chess inside of the robot. Von Kempelen was eventually exposed as a hack, though I personally continue to be impressed with his ingenuity, as apparently do the good folks down at Amazon.
In the mid-to-late 1700??s, there was a bit of a robot craze. If you??re familiar with the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffman, you know there was no better way to insult your girlfriend that by reviling her as a ??lifeless automaton.? (Hoffman was the guy who wrote ??The Nutcracker.? Think about lifeless automatons this holiday season when you??re dragged to see your niece play a mouse. Someone else??s niece, who??s likely a much more accomplished ballerina, is playing the life-sized, wind-up, robot ballerina. Maybe one day your niece will get to play the robot.) With the French and American revolutions looming on the horizon, and the political and cultural upheaval that accompanied the transition in the Western World from the Age of Enlightenment to Romanticism, folks had a lot of very real, very scary things to deal with. But for whatever reason, robots enslaving them and eating their souls was a primary preoccupation. I??m sure that there was a collective sigh of relief when it was discovered that the Mechanical Turk??s greatness came from the aptitude of a living, breathing chess master. It likely lead them to believe that, at least for the time being, there are certain tasks that a real person will do better than a machine. (Not coincidentally, the Luddites became active around the time The Turk stop touring. Take that, technology!)
With this in mind, Amazon has created it??s own Mechanical Turk. While computers and machines have become very good with a variety of important tasks, and have greatly improved our lives, there continues to be a need for administrators (such as myself!) or other kindly folk to interpret different kinds of data. So, Amazon??s Mechanical Turk will pay you a small fee (usually $0.03 per HIT, or Human Intelligence Task,) to do something like look at a picture and tell them whether or not there??s a pizza parlor in the image. At least, that??s the example Amazon gives.
I spent a couple of hours on the site, as I think it??s a very good concept, and I always enjoy getting paid for mindless work. Unfortunately, I haven??t found the site to be as simple or well-executed as I would have liked. Anyone can post their own HIT, so their should be a wide variety of tasks to choose from. The few times I??ve visited, though, I??ve found that there??s little I??m willing to do for what they??re offering. For example, I could have earn $0.06 for researching a company with earth-friendly practices and writing a review about it. I could have earned $0.50 for letting some company I??ve never heard of put an ad on my blog. I could have earned $0.03 for finding the contact email address for Michael??s Fitness in Kentucky (and a bunch of other gyms.) I tried that one, but my efforts were fruitless.
After a couple of hours over a couple of days, I have earned one cent, pending approval, for giving some guy a suggestion on what to get his wife for Valentine??s Day. It looks like he??s now taking suggestions for her birthday and Christmas, so I??ll probably go back.
To sum up, I still really like the concept of this website, and am look forward to it becoming popular enough that the right kinds of people are posting the right kinds of tasks for it to be worth my time. I??d have no problem sitting for an hour and saying ??yes this is a Pizza Hut? and ??no this is a Dunkin?? Donuts? while I??m watching reruns of ??House.? Once the writer??s strike is over, though, I??ll reassess.
