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Comment by zvqcMMV6Zcr

19 hours ago

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.

    • I mean, the entire name of Mechanical Turk plays on "packaging up humans as technology", given the original Mechanical Turk was a "machine" where the human inside did the work.