Mechanical Turk: Bionic Systems, Enabling the Poor, the Distant, the Disabled

Over at the Seed Round Blog, You Mon Sang characterizes the Amazon Mechanical Turk as a Bionic System.

As he ably describes it, classical bionics is the study of living organisms with the intention of applying their principles to the design of man-made systems and devices. He notes that the Mechanical Turk reverses the direction of this knowledge transfer, allowing humans to help out computers. Indeed, I have sometimes described the Mechanical Turk as "An API to let you access human intelligence."

 

Richard Miller has another take on the Mechanical Turk, seeing it as an enabling technology to allow the disabled, poor, or geographically disadvantaged (yikes, that sounds way too politically correct) to participate in the world economy. In conjunction with MIT's $100 laptop project, the barriers to this are certainly coming down. Of course, we still need better ways to get good connectivity and bandwidth to these remote areas, but I am sure that someone is working on this.

-- Jeff;