Why is Artificial AI So Lame?
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 12th, 2007 1:01 amRead/Write Web wonders about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and its failure to gain traction. From reading this, mTurk seems to fall into the “this is crazy” category as opposed to the “just didn’t catch on” category.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Web 2.0 is how people will work their hearts out for micropayments that are in all likelihood tiny supplements to their income. The image I have in my head is the blogger slacking off at his insurance job as he makes minor tweaks to improve his AdSense CPMs or his Amazon referrals — all for that extra $100 in beer money. If he redirected that energy to his job, he’d probably get a raise worth a lot more than $100/month.
From this vantagepoint, micropayments make little economic sense. They aren’t about the money (certainly not when Guy Kawasaki is clearing $3,350 a year) but about pride of ownership and getting rewarded for doing something you love. The comparison I make to my wife about this is that creating a web presence is like tending a garden.
Having gone off on this tangent about the vices and virtues of micropayments, what Mechanical Turk is doing is nuts, even factoring in the low economic bar set by micropayments. 5 cents for an hour’s worth of work? Umm, no thanks. One problem is asking an educated-if-bored audience to do menial jobs. The lesson of micropayments is entirely different: high-net individuals will do interesting work for little pay. The second problem is a high barrier to entry before seeing any payoff. Most social sites work because they have very low barriers to entry.
Here at Overclocked, we don’t shy away from sweeping generalizations so we’ll come out and say this: deus ex machina doesn’t work when dealing with serious web apps. We’ve seen a tangle of products like Cha Cha that hope to demystify the Web with guides that will help you find that needle in a haystack, but almost always the AI of Google or the “wisdom of crowds” of the blogosphere works better. Even when individual opinions come into play, they are almost always aggregated into a collective wisdom that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
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Tagged: amazon 
mechanical turk micropayments
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