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Your New Boss Is a Robot

by Joshua Fruhlinger on April 4, 2007 at 10:18 AM

Amazon's New Human Slave Patent
Amazon's latest patent, called the "Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement," has people a little freaked out. As reported by Slashdot, the patent describes a, shall we say, situation, in which some program or robot called "Task Server" arranges humans to do things called "subtasks". While that may at first sound like a benevolent division-of-labor scheme, things get very creepy when the patent describes how the human workers are ranked based on skill-set and education.

For instance, the patent divides humans into education sets, like "college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated." In essence, the Task Server robot looks at the task at hand, does what it can at the high end, and then calls for humans with various skills to finish the job. Consider this tasty tidbit: '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%.'

As to what Amazon plans to do with the mighty Task Server, no one is sure. This could just be a fancy customer-service algorithm that will save us some headaches in the future when we want to return DVDs, but for some reason we can't get comfortable with the worker-bee terminology.

From Slashdot

Tags: amazon, patents, robots, scifi

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