Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

Idea... "Alexa, how do I (get you to do/ask for)..." "Sorry, I'll have to think about that for a few minutes" In that time, a support tech reviews the question, perhaps with some machine leaning assistance, and then gets back to you with the answer. "(first name), about your request, you can (insert instruction or apology)." Amazon already has mechanical turk... no reason why Alexa shouldn't take advantage.

View on HN

Because mechanical turk MUST be supervised. The reward is disassociated from performance - it's the agent problem, writ large, since workers are effectively anonymous and paid piecework. In any paper using mechanical turk, half or more is trying to get the humans to do what they're told correctly. (They behave more like mischevious djinn than computers if allowed to act freely.) Just dropping in mechanical turk without a feedback system would lead to arbitrary responses, unhandled queries, and unsolvable inconsistencies.

> support tech

Amazon employees with more to lose than a few cents per hour.

This. I really don't understand why companies are so allergic to human intervention.

I would imagine it's because, unlike with computerised services, the per-interaction costs aren't entirely consistent and have non-negligible cost. It's also much much harder to hire and retain people than it is to buy a million new blackbox computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com