Artificial artificial intelligence

There is a famous story about a robot shaped like a Turk that played chess in the late 18th century¹. The truth is that behind the robot there was a person who was actually doing the playing.

That idea is what inspires the name of Amazon’s new project:

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Artifical Artifical Inteligence

The idea is that Amazon will pay for tasks that only humans can perform, the so-called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks).

Things as simple as: how many chessboards do you see in this image?

A new way to earn a few cents by improving the information Amazon handles.
Thousands of people working behind the scenes, creating the illusion that there is a great artificial intelligence.
An interesting model. Remember that the value of information businesses will be determined by the relevance of that information, and since we don’t have artificial intelligence yet, we can fake it.

Clever.…

Fortune or glory

In fact, a HIT can be transcribing or summarizing a book, or translating it.

One of the foundations of what is being called Web 2.0 is giving power and participation to the user, and this is one of the most powerful examples.

Want to do innovative business in Web 2.0? Get your users to participate. Bring them into your business by motivating them to take part, whether for fortune (like Amazon) or for glory (like Wikipedia).