At my last job, there was a great guy named Wamique who came on in a support role and rapidly rose through the ranks. We were managing a legacy email auto responder system, and something had gone wrong with the API (application programming interface) that read the request files and automatically sent out the proper responses. It wasn’t worth it to recode the system, as we were about to migrate to a new email platform. So we assigned Wamique to manually review the incoming mail, look at the request, and place the file in the appropriate directory. Mindless work, really, and I felt bad about giving it to him, but he did a great job with it. We started calling him the “Human API.”
Today, Amazon introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, named after a legendary chess-playing machine from 1769 that contained a hidden human doing the actual thinking. You can sign up and perform small tasks for very small amounts of money (3 cents to decide which photo best represents a particular store, 65 cents to write a product description). The product has web services interfaces, so that developers can easily submit tasks for human completion.
Sounds like a great idea. What other kinds of problems would lend themselves to this type of solution? Language translation? Face recognition? Handwriting recognition?
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