This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant
I was reading an article by Jim Giles about crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing is one of those buzzy new technology trends that I generally try to avoid writing about. It’s not that I am against it or anything, it’s just that a lot of people have already written really good articles / blogs / books about it.
But in reading his article, I realized that I had missed something about crowd-sourcing – that it’s quite possible that humans are being managed by machines. Now, this isn’t “Soylent Green is made of PEOPLE!” level of surprise, and maybe you already knew this, but I didn’t.
According to Giles, Boris Smus, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, used software to post a request to Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing Website run by Amazon. The same software also posted editing and writing jobs. As the results came in, it farmed the text back out for further checking and editing. The result was an encyclopedia entry on New York City, produced by humans but managed by machine.
Associate Creative Director at bloomfield knoble