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Comment by carbocation | Hacker News Reader

They don't mention the price per HIT. If they're paying between $0.01 and $0.05 for these HITs, I'm not surprised by these results.

I looked at the cited paper and did not see the cost, but without the cost I really would not bother interpreting these results. "Machines work for electricity; humans need real money. News at 11."

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Who is to say that the mechanical turk-ers aren't AI?

Now there's an idea. It would be a beautiful irony if, in a few years from now, the mechanical turk API was used as an open platform for AI applications to make money solving difficult problems.

Well according to the article, this would be lucrative to some extent right now. As ever it would be a problem of matching problems to algorithms.

EDIT: maybe we can get the real MTers to do the algorithm/problem matching bit...

I've always had a bizarre idea that it would be awesome to apply for some low level data entry job at a low-tech company with no programming staff. Then automate the task and get loads of work done while not actually being at the office, repeat this with several other jobs until the sum of the data entry jobs pay is greater than that of an individual programmer.

But then I realized that, in most offices, work done is meaningless next to number of hours spent in the building ;)

My dad knew a guy who got fired trying to do what you described.

Still, if you were motivated, you could get paid to sit and browse BoingBoing all day. :-)

>Still, if you were motivated, you could get paid to sit and browse BoingBoing all day.

There are a lot of much easier ways to achieve this. As if you'd want to...

Do bayesian classifiers dream of electric sheep?

Actually if they are true bayesians they probably dream of the surrounding landscape, the quality of grass the sheep graze on, seasonal weather conditions, available water quality and probably most important, an entire subset of classifiers related to the competence of the shepherds.

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