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Amazon Patents Humans Assisting Computers 236

theodp writes "Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary sci-fi, with claims covering the use of humans 'of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated' to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer. From the patent: 'For examples, the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' Yikes."
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Amazon Patents Humans Assisting Computers

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  • by oskay ( 932940 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:56PM (#18597141) Homepage
    predict that the first post will have something to do with our new robotic overlords....
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by njfuzzy ( 734116 )
      How can you make a post predicting the first post?
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mpaque ( 655244 )
      Quiet, coppertop. Get back to work.

      Now, I need to strap 110 college educated French speakers in parallel, tied to the output of wikiedia.fr...
    • Re:I for one... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:05PM (#18597275) Homepage Journal
      Welcome to Manna [marshallbrain.com]. Come to my journal if you want to invest in The Oregon Project, just in case....
      • So, I read a little bit of the Manna story thing. The first thing that was actually somewhat creepy also happened to be the first thing that was implausible unless the AI people have really made some huge (read world-changing) breakthroughs that I haven't heard about.

        In Chapter 2, Manna prevents the walmart workers from running into each other while they are working, because the time spent talking to one another makes them slightly less efficient. Either the Manna system came up with this idea on its ow
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          Huge breakthrough my ass. All you gotta do is give the system a way to measure the performance of workers and datamine for protocol changes that result in better performance. There's been dozens of systems made by college students that do exactly this.

          I conclude that the whole Manna story is rather implausible and a gratuitous scare attempt.

          No, it's a story for purposes of entertainment and philosophical reflection.. but yes, you do have to get more than half way through it before you can appeciate the message.

          • by Jartan ( 219704 )

            No, it's a story for purposes of entertainment and philosophical reflection


            Yes and his argument clearly shows why people are idiots for getting "philosophical reflection" from works of fiction.
      • I read a couple of pages. This is obviously sci-fi. Very interesting sci-fi, actually. I read two pages and it was quite gripping. Well done.

        Your post is the second reference to this story, and both times it was implied that it is a real story. But, it refers to the year 2009 in the past tense. Not entirely implausible, but also not a real historical account...unless I slept a LONG time last night.

        Forgive me if I'm being captain obvious, here, and this story about manna is well know by a subset of /.
      • by Rei ( 128717 )
        I have serious plausibility problems with your story, especially your timeline. Technicals are pretty good, though. A little slow for plot progression, but not intolerably slow. You don't diverge into excessive description, POV is constant, grammar is good, etc.

        Planning to query it anywhere? What's the word count? Broken up, this might make for nice serial in a SF magazine.
    • I read over the patent. The first image that came to mind was...your typical cubicle farm office.
    • Since your's is the first post, that's a self-fulfilling prophesy...
  • In other news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neoform ( 551705 ) <djneoform@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:57PM (#18597157) Homepage
    Amazon patents "using a computer".
    • by Knara ( 9377 )
      Pretty much. Oh look, the computer can schedule tasks and send them to people. How innovative!
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Except for the computer, it sounds like most of the jobs that I had during college. Thinking back, a lot of the bosses I had could have been replaced with comuters and everyone would have been happier.
      • Ouch. How silly I've been all this time!
        I always sweared that all those stupid tasks that came by email where from the PHB/PMP project manager. And all the time it was the computer!
      • It's slightly more complex than that. The system assigns tasks to multiple people and gives them an accuracy rating (either with a similar system or mathematically). They're paid according to accuracy, and the most accurate result (or some subset of results) is returned.

        Still, that isn't groundbreaking; it's a simple arrangement of existing methods.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          There's a very good chance this is a semi-supervised machine learning thing.

          (Un-disclaimer: I do research in machine learning.)

          So you've got this algorithm that, if you give it a bunch of labeled data, it can predict labels for unseen data. (Maybe it labels current best-sellers as likely or unlikely to interest a customer based on his buying habits.) Great. Well, somebody's got to label that data. Human time is expensive. On the other hand, you need as much data as possible: the more the better.

          Semi-supervi
    • It sounds a little different, though, I haven't read the patent. This is more like a computer using a human to complete a task, and like they've established some probabilistic bounds that the task will be done correctly, which is actually pretty cool.

      It sounds kind of like having an interactive proof system, except that the prover is a person. It's kind of a unique twist from the patent side (though, perhaps not a giant conceptual leap), and it's not really a YRO issue, IMHOP, though one could imagine job
    • This sounds a lot like the Slashdot moderation system. Humans check what other humans write, then get graded on their grade. Thusly they build a karma which enables them to be read.

      I think we just discovered what that new image search engine is!

      SCENE INT: Enter room with 300,000 East Indians with turbans sitting in cubicles in front of computer monitors

      Or amazon could be getting into the concert ticket business ;)
  • Insert disk... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by muffel ( 42979 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @07:59PM (#18597193)
    ... in drive A:

    I've done that since the 80's.

  • by notgm ( 1069012 )
    my computer told me not to read TFA. did i miss anything?
    • I did not understand, and he were speaking in the blaze rose and very wide, `what a full of him, my limbs. Joe and that stuff's of his first words. `Tried to be out of it. After- wards, she beggared me. `When shall ever could make such a relief to speak (I thought I do not a moment of them, Joe came back, but another horizontal line beyond, was with both, for a reckless witness under similar circum- stances. I am indebted for it had been made Joe put straws down

      (c) 2007 Nugneant's PC, with help from Marko
  • by Diomidis Spinellis ( 661697 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:02PM (#18597223) Homepage
    Amazon has already deployed such a system under the name of Mechanical Turk [amazon.com]. The idea is that humans assist computers, providing what is cutely named artificial artifical intelligence. You can read more about the concept in an article [acmqueue.com] that ACM Queue run on May 2006.
    --
    Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective [spinellis.gr]
    • by mls ( 97121 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:11PM (#18597353)
      Mod parent up

      On the "Data Improvement" front, I implemented something like this maybe 5 or 6 years ago. The company had a workforce of "lower" cost data entry staff, and when volumes of data came in over the web, we validated what we could programmitically, then routed questional records to human staff for cleanup and use in building a dictionary of sorts that made our automated process better. It was more cost effective to go this hybrid computing route than to throw lots of "expensive" programming at it.
    • by Seumas ( 6865 )
      Also, as the example clearly shows - only college educated persons can speak foreign languages! Everyone else is retarded!

      Let's do away with the academic level and focus on proven expertise and skill. Otherwise about 60% of our top CEOs and inventors would be off digging ditches somewhere.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by smallpaul ( 65919 )

      The idea is that humans assist computers, providing what is cutely named artificial artifical intelligence.

      You can spin this as "humans assisting computers" but you can just as easily think of it as humans doing work in a workflow dictated by computers. This idea is very, very, common. I mean a call-center is just a place where humans "help" computers to answer questions from other humans. And an IT support system is a place where humans "help" computers to solve the IT problems of other humans. Amazon

  • ...but I couldn't help the machine because that
    would be against the patent.
    • by Dunbal ( 464142 )
      ...but I couldn't help the machine because that
      would be against the patent.


            You should have posted as AC, because now the patent police (and SCO) are on their way to bust down your door.
  • by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:06PM (#18597279)
    Automaker Ford was ganted the following patent: A hybrid automobile/human driving arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist an automobile to solve particular tasks, such as transporting a human, or other non-human items such as freight...
  • what is unique about this? what makes this qualify as non-obvious? patents generally need to be issued to people that come up with ideas the person of average skill in the relevant field could not reasonably be expected to use. in short, why is the idea of using people to solve problems that computers either can't or are very slow/ineeficient at anything new? take google for example, their new image categorization game goes along these lines- using people's brain power to tag images- so the question is:
    • by geekoid ( 135745 )
      "...ideas the person of average skill in the relevant field could not reasonably be expected to use."

      That is not true.
      "...to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.""

      about obvious:
      " Even if the subject matter sought to be patented is not exactly shown by the prior art, and involves one or more differences over the most nearly similar thing already known, a patent may still be ref
    • at least based on the description.

      It's nothing but "skills based routing [wikipedia.org]," applied to a broader range of problems. It's like trying to patent the wheel, because you used 5 of them when building your pentacycle [spencerbro...allery.com].
    • by QuantumG ( 50515 )
      Nothing is patent worthy on Slashdot.

      Someone could invent a way to turn shit into rocket fuel and Slashdot residents would say it wasn't novel.
      • by thorgil ( 455385 )
        If I remember correctly...

        The spaceship Discovery, from the 2001 and 2010 movies, used ammonia/oxygen as fuel.
        And ammonia can be derived from shit/piss.

        Voila! /T
        • by QuantumG ( 50515 )
          And you're presenting this as prior art?

          Just reenforces how little the average Slashdotter knows about the novelty test of patent law.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mindwhip ( 894744 )
      We have a very obvious prior art right here staring us all in the face... the moderation system on /.

      There is no way a computer (at this time) could actually rate posts as off-topic, funny etc so people (of various educational backgrounds) are assigned by the computer to process the information and return the result to the computer. This is then verified by others doing the same thing, as well as meta moderated and all the other bits that go into who gets selected to get mod points in the future.

      Gratz Ama
  • Interactive proof system with a human prover == not terribly scary to me.
  • by daigu ( 111684 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:10PM (#18597321) Journal

    A hybrid [boss/worker working] arrangement which advantageously involves [worker] humans to assist a [boss] to solve particular tasks, allowing the [boss] to solve the tasks more efficiently. In one embodiment, a [boss/worker] system decomposes a task, such as, for example, [making a car], into subtasks for human performance, and requests the performances. The [C-level boss/worker] system programmatically conveys the request to a [lower level boss] of the hybrid [boss/worker] arrangement, which in turn dispatches the subtasks to [workers] operated by [line level bosses]. The [workers] perform the subtasks and provide the results back to the [line level boss], which receives the responses, and generates a [report] for the task based at least in part on the results of the [worker] performances [and the rest based on whatever crap H.R. wants to hear.].

    Your scary sci-fi scenario sounds remarkably like modern working life - refined by years of Taylorism.

  • by plams ( 744927 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:11PM (#18597337) Homepage
    ...by any chance be a viable replacement for the management where I work?
  • Sounds like what CAPTCHA farms already do.
    • Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @10:20PM (#18598547) Homepage Journal
      Oh boy. I tell ya. The concept of patent clearly isn't part of the education system.

      Imagine I invent a new kind of lawn mower. I file a patent to protect my invention for 20 years so I can commercialize it without having to worry about the existing lawn mower companies snapping up my invention and beating me to market. What's the title on the patent going to be? That's right:

      "A mechanism for the automated trimming of grass."

      In the patent I will describe how the mechanism works. What prior art there has been in automatted trimming of grass, why my invention is novel and how hard/easy it is to manufacture.

      So will get posted to Slashdot about it?

      "Man Patents Lawnmower."

      Then everyone will have a bit of a moan about how the patent office doesn't know what they're doing anymore and maybe they'll quote a few lines from the patent where I'm outlining what a lawnmower is with the intention of claiming that this is what I am patenting.

  • This video on Human Computation [google.com] describes using humans as part of a distributed computing grid for interpretting captchas, and categorizing images.

    ...And they'll actually particpate, en masse -- without pay -- thinking they're just playing an online *game.*
  • by emptybody ( 12341 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:17PM (#18597413) Homepage Journal
    RSS feed for this story stated

    "Amazon Patents Humans Ass"

    that had me rolling on the floor!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:38PM (#18597667)
    It's all fun and games now but it won't be funny when the machine decides your next task is to "Give me your clothes" in an Austrian accent.
  • by CptPicard ( 680154 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:39PM (#18597683)
    ... although the thought is potentially offensive to some. Wouldn't working as a wetware computer-augmenting classifier be the perfect job opportunity for a mentally handicapped person? I mean, someone with a regular IQ would find it boring over time to tell apart cats and dogs in pictures, but it sounds like a challenge for someone who is not in possession of such faculties. And this is exactly the sort of task that is troublesome for AI, while it being trivial for even "challenged" people! Cross-check the responses, reward those who vote with the consensus, and you've got something that actually might even work as a teaching tool... and how many Down's syndrome people could say they hold a "computer job"?

    Don't flame me, I'm physically disabled myself and therefore am quite familiar with the troubles disabled people of all kinds face in particular when it comes to finding meaningful employment...
    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:07PM (#18597951)
      ... although the thought is potentially offensive to some.

      There's a lot of people out there who want to be offended and are looking for ways to be offended. Why? It's a form of bullying, IMHO. They want a reason to order you to change behavior. And when you ask them why they are offended, they give some half-ass answer. It's just a power trip.

      Sorry about your handicap and I'm sorry you had to mention it so that you wouldn't be modded "Troll" or "Flamebait".

    • by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @10:07PM (#18598467) Homepage
      This would be perfect if it could be done from home.

      And my 5-year-old would be happy because he'd get to play "games" as much as he wanted.

      "Is it bedtime yet?"

      "I SAID CLICK ON THE DOGS!!!"
    • I agree with you 100%.

      Honestly, I'd rather have someone with disabilities doing this than bagging my groceries (and smashing my eggs).

      I have a family member who is mentally handicapped. It is very hard for her to find a job that she can do well. I think it's insulting to let someone handicapped do a job in a sub-par fashion. Handicapped people should be able to do a job, obviously, with reasonable accommodations, in order to keep the job. And yet, mentally handicapped people need jobs; it's an important
  • Already done (Score:4, Informative)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @08:45PM (#18597743)
    They already do this at Target.

    The employees all wear walkie-talkies and I've heard them come on with an obviously computer synthesized voice telling them a "guest" needed assistance in _____ dept. Or more team members were needed to cashier, ect requesting to know who would address the issue. And they would answer back to it just like they were acknowledging their boss's orders.
    • Re:Already done (Score:4, Informative)

      by Manchot ( 847225 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:52PM (#18598353)
      I think you're looking too much into this. I worked at Target during high school, and what you heard is far less sinister than you believe it to be. The computer telling the "team members" that a "guest" needs assistance is triggered by a customer picking up one of the service phones peppered throughout the store. The reason that the employees try to respond so quickly is that the phones have something written on them to the effect of "A team member will be with you within the next x minutes," and people get angry if you're not there fast enough.

      As for the "Additional cashiers to the front lane," that is actually triggered by the cashiers themselves via a button on their registers. Typically, the manager up front would just call for backup directly if there was a sudden wave of customers, but on occasion, the manager would be busy elsewhere. In that case, one of the cashiers could just press the button without stopping (i.e., slowing down) to do it manually. More practically, the cashiers aren't given walkie-talkies because the collective noise from ten nearby walkies would be disruptive to the customers. Also, the phones at each lane were tied into the walkie system, but it didn't work very well, and it was just easier to push the button.

      Probably the worst computer-control issue at Target was the "speed score" system. Basically, after every transaction, they'd assign you a score (either G for green, or R for red), indicating whether you were fast enough on that transaction. Your overall scores were then tabulated on a monthly basis. When I first started, you wouldn't know your score on an individual customer, and you could only know your monthly average. Being a 17-year-old, I tried to get the highest score possible, and I did pretty well (something like best average in the store for six months). However, about halfway through my tenure there, they switched to a system that showed you your score after each customer, which soon led me to see how flawed it actually was. You see, I quickly figured out that if not for the customers themselves, I would have gotten a G on every transaction. The problem was that the system basically worked by assigning every item an allowed scan time (so a thing of dog food might be 30 seconds, while a pencil might be 5 seconds). From what I could tell, it also allowed a certain amount of time for payment. What I noticed is that as long as there were a few items (about four or more), I would always get a G, no matter what. When it came down to just a couple of items, I would often get a R. Why? As it turned out, the customer would squander my allowed time by taking a long time to figure out the machine that Target uses for credit and debit cards. In the end, the only effect that speed scores had on me was to get me angry at the people I was supposed to be serving. Yes, you heard that right: I would get a little mad at people for not being efficient enough.
  • ... is available in Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age, where exactly this technique is used and described in some detail.

    For a slightly scarier version, try Vernor Vinge's use of focus in A Fire Upon the Deep.

    • For a slightly scarier version, try Vernor Vinge's use of focus in A Fire Upon the Deep.

      Vernor Vinge was exactly what I thought of as well. Although wasn't it A Deepness in the Sky that had focus?
      • Although wasn't it A Deepness in the Sky that had focus?
        It was, and I was to tired when I typed the original message.
  • ...YOU program COMPUTERS!

    *sigh*
  • One of my areas of interest for my Ph.D. research is multi-agent systems. The concept Amazon is describing is so old that there's a term for it. "Human in the loop." This is where a human agent is considered to be a part of a heterogeneous multi-agent system.
  • I believe fellow data center tape loaders (particularly those who were employed at Acxiom) are familiar with this concept already. A user in a far away land requests information from a database via a mainframe which sends a print job to a networked printer in another room where tapes are housed and a minimum wage employee fetches the tape and loads it onto a tape reader that the mainframe reads and sends the information back to the user. Rather ridiculous. I even remember telling my coworkers they'd all be
  • Prior Art (Score:2, Insightful)

    On the fromt page today:
    "New Algorithms Improve Image Search" http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/03/1952205.shtm l [slashdot.org]
    The algorithm is based on users providing input upon computer request to classify images.
  • THE FUTURE

    171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decade and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several possibilities.

    172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better that human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and

  • Couldn't the system be reduced to a light comes on, human presses a key, human gets cookie? With enough lights and enough cookies you could get a human to do most any computer related task.
  • Does this mean I can patent humans helping humans use a computer?
  • Why is this scary? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gordo_1 ( 256312 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:37PM (#18598235)
    You can see the type of work available for anyone to process on Amazon's Mechanical Turk right here: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false [mturk.com]

    It's things like helping categorize images or finding specific things in databases of images or inspecting contracts -- you know the kind of stuff that's really easy for humans but is really difficult for computers.

    I've tried a few in the past, however, most of the available "HITs" pay only a few pennies a piece, so I'm not about to go quitting my day job to sit at home fulfilling these requests quite yet.
  • It seems to me that Fritz Lang's Metropolis would be easy to cite as prior art.

  • Those skilled in the art will recognize this as the obvious solution to a problem. I really need to come to grips with the fact that every single application of any software construct is patentable, no matter what. I keep forgetting that.

    Those skilled in the art will also recognize this "invention" as being very similar to the Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders Project [pgdp.net], which is notable for a) rocking and b) having gone online before the patent was filed.

    It's to the point of insanity now—it's

  • All the Ts are crossed and each i has been dotted; it's just a matter of days until my patent will be issued, covering interstellar alien/human interaction. I'm going to be rich! Rich beyond my wildest dreams!
  • Actually, this sort of thing is inevitable, considering the growing concentration of wealth (in the USA, at least) among a tiny fraction of the population. Over time, more and more people will be employed to service the whims of the ultrawealthy. As this graphic [wsj.com] shows, all recent growth in recent years has been skimmed to serve the ends of those at the upper margin.

    Is this bad? Hard to say--maybe our new overlords know better than we how to spend society's resources. We shall see...


  •   Why did Amazon.com file such a patent? And where does it fit into Amazon.com's current market niche. Their nick is Online Retailer.
  • In the call centre, humans are made to wear headphones with the little microphone thingy. They are strapped into chairs, and an IV is inserted into each arm, one containing a stimulant, the other a relaxant. Electrodes for measuring galvanic skin response, as well as heart monitors are attached. The central computer queues calls, and assigns them to available humans. If it is detected that a human is becoming agitated, the relaxant iv drip is opened. If the human seems too relaxed, the stimulant drip i

  • Spammers started doing something very much like this shortly after captchas became popular. I don't know if they continued doing it, but for a while some porn sites were presenting captchas from other sites, asking the user to provide the answer, and then the porn site would use the user's input to respond to the captcha at the target web site.
  • We called it Porn-Sourcing... we would have a system for distributing manual data entry tasks to people and provide access to Porn as payment. 10 tax returns == 100MB downloads, etc.

    It was a great idea until P2P killed to Porn problem... now everyone has unlimited access to Porn, why would they do work for it anymore... even if they did, they'd post in on a network and we'd lose half our workforce for the day until we got some new content they wanted.

    Oh well, good luck Amazon... hope your business model is

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