鈥淚鈥橠 RATHER have a computer as my boss than a jerk,鈥� says Daniel Barowy. To that end he has created AutoMan, the first fully automatic system that can delegate tasks to human workers via crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon鈥檚 Mechanical Turk.
Artificial intelligence is improving all the time, but computers still struggle to complete certain tasks that are easy for us, such as quickly reading a car鈥檚 license plate or translating a joke. To get round this, people can post such tasks on platforms like Mechanical Turk for others to complete. Barowy wanted to automate this process 鈥� and AutoMan was born.
鈥淲e think of it as a new kind of computing,鈥� says Barowy, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 鈥淚t changes the kind of things you can do.鈥�
Advertisement
Barowy and colleagues designed AutoMan to send out jobs, manage workers, accept or reject work and make payments. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e replacing people鈥檚 bosses with a computer,鈥� he says.
The quality guarantee is the most important contribution of the work, says Barowy. 鈥淲ithout a mechanism for addressing the quality of worker output, full automation is not possible.鈥�
Unlike existing crowdsourcing platforms, AutoMan doesn鈥檛 attempt to predict the reliability of its workers based on their previous performance. Instead, if it is not sure it has the correct answer, it keeps on posting the same job, upping the fee each time, until it is confident that it does.
鈥淥ne way to think about it is that it saves the interesting parts, the creative parts, or the fun parts for people,鈥� says Barowy. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really the best of both worlds. You have the computer doing the grunt work.鈥�
聯The AutoMan software does the grunt work, saving the interesting, creative, fun parts for people聰
AutoMan could be used by developers of apps like , in which blind people take a photo of their surroundings and receive a description of the scene. The algorithm could be incorporated into the app, sending the photos to crowdworkers, choosing the correct descriptions and sending them back to the app鈥檚 user.
Of course, human labour doesn鈥檛 come free. AutoMan will be given a budget by the app developer and be programmed to keep costs down. Quicker 鈥� or higher quality 鈥� responses will cost more but AutoMan will manage all of this automatically. Anyone using such hybrid software wouldn鈥檛 know whether they were interacting with a machine or a crowd of humans 鈥� or both.
So how do Mechanical Turk workers feel about being directly employed by a computer? Barowy has received positive feedback so far. When a human boss rejects your work, it can feel personal or unfair. But that鈥檚 not the case with AutoMan. 鈥淧eople ended up liking the system because it鈥檚 impartial,鈥� he says. The team presented the work at the conference in Tucson, Arizona, last month.
鈥淎ny programmer could pick this up and use it,鈥� says of Stanford University in California. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a really powerful thing.鈥� Bernstein has developed hybrid computational systems himself, such as , a word processor that uses crowd workers to edit text.
Barowy鈥檚 team hopes that their system will make crowdsourcing mainstream, with software delegating tasks to human workers around the globe. 鈥淎utoMan might even help grow a new class of jobs that could become a new sector of the world economy,鈥� says team member , also at the University of Massachusetts.
People power makes Google work
Google likes to give the impression that it organises the world鈥檚 information using algorithms alone, but the manual for its human raters tells the true story. Google鈥檚 small army of home workers have a big say in what sites we are offered when we type in a search term.
The manual, revealed by technology website The Register, gives instructions on how raters should judge whether a set of search results matches a user鈥檚 intention. They are also asked to make calls on a website鈥檚 鈥渞elevance鈥� 鈥� something that popular myth suggests is handled by the PageRank algorithm alone 鈥� and 鈥渜uality鈥�. Raters are told to look for websites with content that is less than four months old.
