Over at Geek Limit, AtariBoy has some interesting thoughts and questions about mTurk (or MT as he calls it - which is another thread altogether - what's your pet name for Mechanical Turk?) In any case, the post asks some basic what if questions about the service.

AtariBoy wrote:

If we can take the programming of an Artificial Intelligence program, say, for a fire-fighting robot, as post 100,000 pictures of fires-in-progress, we might be able to use MT to gather the intelligence of thousands of fire fighters and build a pretty good AI.

For another example, why not use MT to program the AI for the vehicles in the Grand Challenge? We all know how to drive (most of us). If a computer could learn from 1 million our visually-based decisions and learn how to navigate the desert, at $.03 per MT job, $30,000 would be a small price to pay! Add in the functionality of Riya, and you would have the added ability not only to stay on the road automatically, but also be able to read signs and symbols (i.e. if Riya sees 'Railroad Crossing', pan camera to left and right, take another shot left and right 10 seconds later, and compare to see if train is coming)

And one of the beauties of the web is that ideas like this get picked up, expanded upon, and maybe eventually turned into actualities.

And as a side note, check out the Grand Challenge if you haven't heard of it before. If you're into AI at all, you'll really be into it (Although if you're into AI, you've probably already heard about it. ;)

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