I understand that the internet owners would like nothing more than to plug us in, like captive humans in the Matrix movies, to the global grid. But does Amazon, the online retailer founded by science-fiction-loving Jeff Bezos, have to glory in the supremacy of the machine?The Seattle company launched an automated offshoring service, Mechanical Turk, named after the famous 19th-century illusion in which a hidden performer controlled a chess-playing automaton. For the language of the patent just awarded, Bezos' company abandons cute historical references for a dystopian science fiction. Amazon's "hybrid machine/human computing arrangement" calls for the use of "humans" to perform subtasks dispatched by computer. For example: "The task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%."
