Amazon was recently awarded a patent ("Hybrid machine/human computing arrangement") for Amazon Mechanical Turk, their on-line workforce that's been called a "virtual sweatshop" (see earlier post). Nicholas Carr writes about it at his blog:
The patent, which reads like an instruction manual from a dystopian future, goes into great detail about how the system might work in evaluating the skills and performance of the "human operated nodes." The system might, for example, want to classify the human workers according to whether they are "college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, [or] not formally educated." It also lays out an example of the system incorporating "multiple humans" to carry out a particular subtask, "each of the humans being identified as being capable of satisfying at least some of the associated criteria for the [subtask]," and then synthesizing a result from their combined inputs.
Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Amazon patents cybernetic mind-meld.
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