I believe that we have talked about this once before, but I believe that it deserves another mention. Basically, Amazon Mechanical Turk is described as a “artificial artificial intelligence”. In other words, it has the ability to ask humans to accomplish specific tasks instead of the other way around.

Amazon.com has launched a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can’t do itself.

The name Mechanical Turk dates back to 1769, when a Hungarian nobleman created a wooden robot-like mannequin that could play chess — even defeating chess fanatic Benjamin Franklin in Paris.

The Mechanical Turk toured around Europe to the amazement of large crowds and to the suspicion of a great many skeptics who surmised that a chess master was hiding inside. (Edgar Allen Poe even wrote an article detailing how it could be done.) [Read the rest]