Mechanical Turk

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a strange twist on artificial intelligence problems. Rather than having people ask computers question and hope they're intelligent (they usually aren't), let computers ask people questions and get intelligent answers. After all, there are tasks that people are much better at than computers. Amazon gives an example of image annotation ("find pizzas in these photos"). Easy for us. And maybe with enough annotated data, the machines could learn to figure it out for themselves.

Reminds me of Push Singh's Open Mind Common Sense research. Push figured the best way to collect lots of knowledge was to just ask people. Makes sense, but it seemed like a wild idea at the time. Surprisingly, it actually worked…several applications came out of the Open Mind work, all displaying some form of commonsense reasoning.

Will keep tabs on Mechanical Turk. Oh, did I mention you get paid if you complete tasks? AI that generates revenue…there's a first!

p.s. I need the money…it's tax day.