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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

How soon will it be possible to pick-off Mechanical Turk tasks using computers - assuming it is not being done already? Is this a real opportunity or is the big money going to be made in helping businesses design their work so it can be automated this way (assuming the problems don't degenerate into just another parallel programming task).

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That level of linguistic understanding would be worth considerably more than whatever you could get from mechanical turking.

Perhaps easier would be mass-translation into some other language and then "Turk-Pimping" - using people with lower pay expectations to do tasks and taking a cut of whatever they earn.

All my work on Mechanical Turk is to feed the data into a machine learning process that automates the task. Some tasks are easy to automate (any classification task), some others are harder (anything related to content generation, or vision).

I have to say though that there is a pattern: Once you solve and automate a process, people want more, and push you into doing a task that cannot be easily automated. Then you try to automate it, and the cycle continues...

What does "pick-off Mechanical Turk tasks using computers" mean?

I assumed he was referring to the automated completion of Mechanical Turk tasks.

I think he means "complete", as in automate the tasks. "Pick off" is usually used as in: "The sniper was in the bell-tower, picking the enemy soldiers off one by one" (if you're a grammar geek, it's an optionally separable phrasal verb). It can also be used to refer to completing tasks.

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