The Mormon Church was way ahead of this one.
A new phenomenon has made it's way onto the Internet. It is called Turking. The name comes from and 18th century mechanical mannequin which appeared to be capable of playing chess. The mannequin, dressed in exotic garb, was referred to as "The Turk". It did rather well in games of chess with human players but not because of advanced mechanical programming. Instead, there was a human inside the box pulling the levers and making the crucial strategic decisions. It has been described as artificial artificial intelligence.
Now we are in the computer age when many things can really be done by computers but there are still a number of things that (for the time being at least) require humans. For example, taking pictures of businesses for travel directories; transcribing taxes and recording codes from deeds; and extracting names from old handwritten documents. The last is what the church has been doing for the past 10 years with its Name Extraction Program. And the name for this is called Turking. The next time you use Mapquest, you can reasonably assume that most of the data came from human input and may have been updated and verified through the process of Turking.
Amazon.Com through its subsidiary Amazon Turk now offers a way for people throughout the world to work on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and get paid anything from a penny a name to $4 a picture. Of course, there is quality control built in. Not just anyone can interpret a name or a tax amount on a deed. A person must pass a qualification test. And sometimes work is done by two different people and accepted only if both give the same result. (This is the way the Name Extraction Program works.)
Is it just me or does this look like computers have figured out a way to subcontract out the messy work to humans?
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