Turky, that smart little robot
During the first term at Design Interactions, we have already worked on and presented three projects, even though often they often are rather sketches than completely finished scenarios. With the upcoming Work-in-Progress show at the end of the month, I will have to select and refine one of them. Let me know which one in your opinion is the most promising one–
Turky, that smart little robot (Related brief: 54p7)
As computers grew ever more powerful, the area of artificial intelligence continued failing to show significant progress in basic skills like the understanding of language and making any kind of subjective judgment–tasks which pose no problem to the most poorly educated human.
As a consequence, individuals are increasingly being integrated in the process of the computed management of the world, making the decisions at which the otherwise highly efficient machines get stuck.
This system, which is also in widely used by what used to be called Job Centre Plus put people back into employment, uses a technology which is not unlike what Amazon Inc. launched as Mechanical Turk in the early 2000s. It was, however, a toy company that make the idea an enormous commercial success when they launched “Turky, that smart little robot”, a product which, while seeming entirely autonomous and almost intelligent to millions of kids, was in fact remotely guided by equally many so-called turkers around the world.