Mechanical Turk

The ever-watchful Ransom brought my attention to the Amazon Mechanical Turk program, in which (apparently) you can choose tasks submitted by software engineers and random businesses and complete them for money. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to substitute human intellectual piece-work in lieu of artificial intelligence.

The tip-off arises from a conversation Ransom and I had a while back about using spare brain cycles in the same way the SETI at home project uses spare CPU cycles to look for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This makes me think of two things. First, I'm reminded of my friend Kate's piece-work editing. I'm not sure if she still does it, but when I met her she had a backpack full of rough-drafts from various corporate entities and would rip through them correcting spelling and grammar. As memory serves, when she had work, she could pay her way. When the work would dry up, she ate a lot of ramen.

Second, it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, in which people upload all manners of data (pictures, videos, print-outs they find in the trash) to a massive media network in hopes that someone will want to access it and they'll be paid a royalty.

The idea of using spare brain cycles to make a living is appealing because it seems like the kind of thing you could do when you'd otherwise be sitting around wasting time (something at which I'm a 5th Dan Black Belt.) On the other hand, it's also a bit ominous since there would be zero accountability on the part of the employer; globally, piece-work is one of the most pernicious ways to insure maximum efficiency from workers while paying out a bare minimum in compensation. I'll probably still look into the amazon thing; I'm sick to death of my one video game and without a grad lab to keep me honest, I get next to nothing done for school while I'm on break.

On an unrelated note, as far as I can tell, it's impossible to significantly modify the layout on this stupid system. I wasted a good 25 minutes trying to talk the XML template into letting me have some borders around the text of my blog, but the best I could do was force it to accept one on the left (which just looked all wrong without an equivalent on the right.) I guess I'll have to wait until they start allowing more customization options, not just trying to keep it from breaking every week.

Holiday task for everyone: go burn a sweet mix CD and play it while you're hanging out with your homies.