With all the talk about Artificial Intelligence you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world was on the brink of a Terminator style takeover. Thankfully true AI is still a long way off, and there are a great many tasks that humans can simply do better. These tasks tend to be anything that requires any sort of imagination or feeling. AI can be trained to recognise brands in photos, but it can’t tell you if the picture is of a rowdy night out, or a cuddle in front of the sofa.
Amazon encountered this problem when trying to provide recommendations for customers after they bought a product. To solve it, they built their “Mechanical Turk” service.
"Mechanical Turk" takes its name from a fake clockwork machine, that appeared to be able to play chess. In reality, the machine was being operated by someone hidden inside the machine.
Amazon's service repeats this trick with an API. The service allows users to send instructions about a simple task to thousands of people globally, who will complete it, return their response, and get paid piecemeal. The innovation is that Amazon lets you treat these people as though they were an AI – meaning text or photos can be coded, or audio transcribed, at very large scale. In fact many of the “automated” services providing translation, coding or recommendations aren’t using AI at all – just lots and lots of people.
Until real AI is able to make true imaginative leaps (and we're probably talking at least 50 years yet), harnessing the processing power of people is the next best thing.