Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowd-sourcing service that allows developers and companies to get real people to do small amounts of work that computers can’t do very easily. Amazon markets the service as Artificial Artificial Intelligence, because users can use it to get results similar to very difficult to implement/create artificially intelligent machines. Human intelligence is still highly superior to a computers in many realms. Identifying context within a picture in order to tag it can be done very quickly by a human, but not at all by a computer. Mechanical Turk aims to create large and easy to assemble workforces to complete simple tasks that would otherwise be nearly impossible to finish given their overall volume.Mechanical Turk could be used to tag millions of images with appropriate labels instead of hiring temporary labor for example. It could also be used to have large texts translated into different languages. In this second situation there is a clear need for qualified workers. Amazon has taken this into account and allows companies to put potential workers through tests to see if they are qualified. Companies also have access to the work history of each worker so they may narrow their choices even more. With these measures, companies should be able to get an on demand resizable workforce by simply defining their human Intelligence task (HIT) through Mechanical Turk and setting a wage per task. Amazon will then takes a 10% cut.
