Mechanical Turk and Missing Millionaire

Alright, I'll admit that I'm usually behind on US news, being in England. Most of it doesn't even make it over, which is fine with me. (Although Larry Craig's airport hijinks was a pretty fast-moving story.)

So there is a missing aviator someplace over Nevada, or thereabouts. I knew that, but didn't pay it much attention.

However, Amazon runs something called the Mechanical Turk (a name which has its own interesting backstory) which is essentially a service which matches up assigned tasks with people willing to earn a few cents to a few bucks. It's usually things like doing video transcriptions, making some fake forum posts, etc.

Sometimes, the assignment is to respond to a photo or make an identification in some way, to help make AI smarter.

Today a new assignment popped up on the Mechanical Turk. Using current satellite footage, thousands of users are to scour images of the Nevada wasteland (around the Fossett's last known location) to try and find some trace of him. They can flag any given image to have it sent to a second-level investigation.

That was just mind-blowing to me. How incredibly awesome. See, that is some good use of technology.


As a strange kind of follow-up, no one has found him yet, but they've found a couple other wrecks.