Mechanical Turks and automation

[Joanna Chaplin]

I read Cory Doctorow's book For the Win a couple of years ago. It's a near-future speculation about the unionization of internet workers. Gold farmers, mostly, and Mechanical Turks.

A reference to a device that appeared to play chess but actually contained a human(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk), a Mechanical Turk is someone who agrees to do a simple task that a computer can't do. It works because you can find enough people willing to do it for a small amount of money that it's basically automation. Just human-powered automation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_M...

I thought that Doctorow was exaggerating when he described MMOs hiring people to basically be "on the spot game masters" and handle a situation that a computer didn't know what to do with. But then I heard a segment on NPR talking about how this works in the real world!

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/4086800...

A number of people, especially ones with some sort of physical or emotional disability, make a small income tagging, transcribing, categorizing, teaching neural nets, and whatever else a company needs that a computer can't do yet.

We totally live in the future.