Amazon, the Mechanical Turk, and the future

Posted by Nick Loadholtes on November 8th, 2005 filed in AI, Blogging, Technology, Thinking, Web, Web Services

I used to think that Amazon was just another dot-com company. Then after seeing them survive the burst, I thought they were lucky. No a days I think they are pretty visionary.

I’ve ranted about A9 before, I use their associates program, hell, I even use their Tip Jar system. Suffice it to say I think Amazon is pretty cool. Now they have introduced this Mechanical Turk website.

My first thought was that the idea was interesting, but why call it artificial intelligence? There’s nothing artificial about it. Maybe from all of the data that get some PhD candidate to build a corpus of an expert system of some type, but that seems a way off. What’s the big deal with that?

Well, that question was answered for me today after reading this article. The author points out that with a system like mturk, Amazon has harnessed its existing user base in a way that can generate a ton of business for them. This puts them light years ahead of their competition. And the way that Amazon pays attention to it web services, it shows that they want developers to get into this technology because it is going to be here to stay.

I think that if Microsoft spends all of its time worrying about Google they are going to get blindsided by Amazon. Amazon is leveraging the web in a way I never thought would be possible. They haven’t just built a brand, they’ve built an army.


One Response to “Amazon, the Mechanical Turk, and the future”

  1. jerry chen Says:
    December 11th, 2005 at 2:38 am

    finally, an interface that couples the human element into software computation. one day, we just might become slaves of our own creations. it makes you wonder.

    but MT isn’t just a potentially disruptive technology. it’s an alternative employer-employee relationship where both parties can remain completely anonymous. there’s no staff welfare, and there’s virtually zero commitment. who guarantees the job gets done? this has far reaching implications to the way we do business.

    i think Amazon is on to something.

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