It's been a long while since I have posted a Development entry. I had originally intended this blog to be about computer stuff and development but I was just not getting the therapeutic value out of it so I switched to personal drivel. However, this new offering from Amazon, has my little brain reeling, the opportunities it exposes and the underlying evil it could deliver are to put it bluntly, a complete mind fuck.
First the sales pitch techie stuff, and if your not into it just skip straight to the conclusions:
<techie stuff>Have a programming problem that cannot be solved by computer, for instance a web gallery that only accepts photographs depicting flowers? Well Amazon has come up with the concept of 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence'. It is called the Amazon Mechanical Turk and is a web service API where developers submit tasks, approve completed tasks and incorporate the answers into their software. The application sees the transactions as remote procedure calls while in reality the tasks are performed by a network of humans, for a fee of course. The system works on the basis of a small fee for a small amount of work. Say $0.03 to decide whether or not a photograph does indeed depict a flower. Pseudo code to illustrate:
read (photo);
photoContainsFlower = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsFlower == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}"</techie stuff>
In short a computer programmer issues an instruction, via a computer program, to another human to complete a task. The programmer does this because at the moment the task can either not be completed by computer or is too expensive to be completed by computer.
So...opportunities...3rd world sweat shops performing simple tasks for basic wages, piece work for students, housewives, pensioners etc who could knock off a couple of tasks a day in their spare time and moonlighting work for insomniacs who could take the 2:00am to 6:00am shift. It's even possible that clever people at some distance from the project, say in Nepal, could automate the task thereby cutting out the humans and in effect solving the original programming problem.
And now...dum...dum...dum the underlying evil...<whisper>...imagine a world where an intelligent banking application (which by virtue of it's position has access to unlimited funds) automatically generates arbitrary and endless tasks that consumes the entire working populations working output...</whisper> Impossible you say well what about Tetris (sooo last millennium) and blogging (soooo Now!)
Did you ever wonder what all the brackets <> </> mean…..well here goes:
An instruction in brackets tells your browser how to display text so <b>means display the next text in bold and </b>means stop displaying it in bold......so<whisper> which your browser doesn’t understand is an instruction to you to read the next lot of information in a whisper and </whisper> means stop….in effect <whisper>you’re already taking instruction, via your computer from me, a programmer..…we've got you whispering </whisper>…….BOO!
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