The great leveller
Amazon’s web strategy has never stayed dormant. To become the world’s leading bookseller Jeff Bezos and his crew invested every penny they raised in producing a world class distribution and fulfilment system. To drive these systems, and the webstore, they designed a distributed hardware solution (just like Google).
Last year, Amazon, made the strategic decision to share its resources (for a modest payment), and the world now has Amazon Web Services. Essentially, this gives the ordinary business access to a massive scaleable architecture from the getgo.
Ultimately, Amazon’s motivation is to ensure developers use Amazon’s infrastructure, and by extension code applications for Amazon’s webstore and marketplace. Developers are just another distribution channel.
Despite such massive architecture, Amazon recognised that you still need humans to perform intelligent tasks. In a slightly sinister turn, Bezos asks why not use the Web to create marketplaces of willing human beings who will perform the tasks that computers cannot?
In response Amazon has created Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online service involving human workers, Bezos describes the phenomenon as “artificial artificial intelligence.”
Workers from all over the globe (think poor countries), signup to work on the Turk, performing mundane tasks like matching images with products, in return for micropayments ($0.002 per task, etc).
The evils of capitalism? I don’t think so; just a very smart way of distributing wealth, and giving a pay rate in hard dollars worth much more than local earnings. I’m already thinking of some Turk applications, like writing emails to politicians … please post any Turk ideas on the blog ….
Comments
Leave a Reply