Embedding Workers in User Interfaces
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has become commonly known as the platform that has an interface which allows job-posters to have a job divided into small parts and distribute it among multiple workers for completion. Now developers are asking if that same, human-powered system can be refined as a software application along the same lines as Microsoft spell-checker. According to an article from Electronics Weekly, the first applications are already under development. Michael Bernstein, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed an editing plug-in for Microsoft Word that “looks a little like Word’s spell checker – except that it is powered by humans.” The plug-in, known as Soylent, can be used to shorten or proof-read documents, things that are challenging for computers to do or do accurately. It works by breaking the documents up into chunks, which are sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk for editing and then automatically reassembled back in Word.
According to the article, researchers came up with several creative ideas for human-powered applications. These include tasks that humans can do online, but which computers find difficult. A search engine that ranks images by cuteness, for example. Or a plug-in for Photoshop that crops people or objects from an image; something which would be difficult to write software for, but humans with a little experience of Photoshop find easy.
This development shows that history truly does repeat itself. The first known use of the term computer, in the early 17th century, referred to a person who carried out calculations.
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