Amazon have launched an interesting service called Mechanical Turk. Citing tales of chess masters hidden inside wooden cabinets disguised as mechanical Turkish chess robots, Amazon introduce the service as Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

Programmers can use an API to schedule tasks with the service, tasks that can only be completed by a human. Amazon then brokers these tasks to humans through their website. The humans earn cash for their uniquely human traits.

The immediate thing that springs to my mind is breaking CAPTCHAs. This would seem to quite possibly have implications for security and anti-spam techniques. I’m sure there are similar but clandestine services which have existed for a while, but Amazon’s weight will count for a lot. I assume Amazon will just have to try to ban clients from using the service for these activities. They will be required by law to prevent illegal activity, but catching it will be hard. From a security perspective, computationally intractable but humanly straightforward tasks will no longer really be viable for certain high value tasks, for example protecting services like AdWords.

On the other hand, I think this is more interesting because of the positive things it will provide. Even as a freelancer/startup hacker with very low spending power, it is now possible for me to solve very difficult problems involving intelligence. Amazon allows me to place requirements on the humans who perform my tasks, qualifications. With a qualified workforce, I can ask many difficult questions: “what is the text content of this podcast?” Or “is this site dodgy or respectable?” I could ask the question 100 times and mandate that different workers respond each time, creating a reasonable sample. I could ask “Is this business plan sane?” and require students on business courses respond. There are all kinds of possibilities. I look forward to seeing some interesting applications.

In the longer term, if Amazon is successful in creating a digital market place for intelligence, it will apply some free market economics to the Real Artificial Intelligence industry. Companies that create software that can solve the problems placed on the Mechanical Turk site to a reasonable standard should be allowed to solve this problems in live situations if they can do so more cheaply. The data Amazon collect about the tasks and the solutions will provide an excellent training site for machine learning. I’d love to be able to run some genetic algorithms on the data, and I’m sure Amazon would too.

With this, the Alexa Web Search Platform, S3, the Simple Queue Service and others, Amazon is making a real stand in the web service space, in a way that perhaps only Yahoo! is also doing. I’d love to know what the plan is, certainly to become the platform for a much wider range of revenue generating activities, it’s grid computing. But is there a business model in it?