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Comment by albert_e

16 hours ago

The future is now

Amazon's Mechanical Turk exists since 2005, so we are 20 years in the future

  • MechanicalTurk is for desk jobs and for tasks that originate as ideas in a human mind -- even if they get routed via an API.

    Here we are talking about AI agents coming up with a set of tasks as part of their thinking/reasoning step ..and when some of those tasks are real world physical tasks, assign them to a willing human being.

    Those tasks wont necessarily be desk jobs or knowledge work.

    It could be say -- go chop a tree, or go wave a protest banner, or go flip the open/close sign on my shopfront, or go and preach crustafarianism.

  • Mechanical Turk was for humans to rent a human, which is not a new idea

    • mTurk has an API (and I guess it had it since the beginning). It is, of course, very AWS-que, but LLMs should be able to use it just fine.

      ∗ ∗ ∗

      > which is not a new idea

      I don’t think “[x] but for agents” counts as a new idea for every [x]. I’d say it’s just one new idea, at most.

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