Yes I did say the matrix. It appears that amazon has filed a patent for a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement, not in plain English this means a system of problem solving where humans and computers would work together to solve a problem the humans doing what they are good at and the computers doing what they are good at. I think that this is a great idea that has millions of amazing uses but that it also seems a little scary, after all how hard is it to relate this to movies like iRobot to the Matrix. Because of all the similarities to movies I think that the general public may have a hard time seeing how wonderful this technology is.
Your next question may be, why do we need this hybrid stuff. My first answer is because the word hybrid sounds cool. My second, and more legitimate answer is because computers are really good at some things and humans are extremely good at others. For example when was the last time that you searched a list of trillions of things and came out with just the thing that you were looking for in less that 15 seconds, I will answer that for you, never. But then again when was the last time your computer wrote a 3 page paper for you again the answer is never.
Now amazon has started a service called the mechanical turk that actually uses the ideas that they first patented, the site is here. What you do is you go onto the site and get a HIT which is something that is really hard for computers but really easy for us humans. When you have completed the task successfully you will that get paid a bit of money. So it seems that this could bring a new era of artificial artificial intelligence.
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