/ News
Your next boss could be a computer
Software that delegates tricky problems to human workers is changing the nature of crowdsourcing.
"I'D RATHER have a computer as my boss than a jerk," says Daniel Barowy. To that end he has created AutoMan, the first fully automatic system that can delegate tasks to human workers via crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Artificial intelligence is improving all the time, but computers still struggle to complete certain tasks that are easy for us, such as quickly reading a car's license plate or translating a joke. To get round this, people can post such tasks on platforms like Mechanical Turk for others to complete. Barowy wanted to automate this process - and AutoMan was born.
"We think of it as a new kind of computing," says Barowy, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "It changes the kind of things you can do."
Barowy and colleagues designed AutoMan to send out jobs, manage workers, accept or reject work and make payments. "You're replacing people's bosses with a computer," he says.
The quality guarantee is the most important contribution of the work, says Barowy. "Without a mechanism for addressing the quality of worker output, full automation is not possible."
Unlike existing crowdsourcing platforms, AutoMan doesn't attempt to predict the reliability of its workers based on their previous performance. Instead, if it is not sure it has the correct answer, it keeps on posting the same job, upping the fee each time, until it is confident that it does.
"One way to think about it is that it saves the interesting parts, the creative parts, or the fun parts for people," says Barowy. "It's really the best of both worlds. You have the computer doing the grunt work."
AutoMan could be used by developers of apps like VizWiz, in which blind people take a photo of their surroundings and receive a description of the scene. The algorithm could be incorporated into the app, sending the photos to crowdworkers, choosing the correct descriptions and sending them back to the app's user.
Of course, human labour doesn't come free. AutoMan will be given a budget by the app developer and be programmed to keep costs down. Quicker - or higher quality - responses will cost more but AutoMan will manage all of this automatically. Anyone using such hybrid software wouldn't know whether they were interacting with a machine or a crowd of humans - or both.
So how do Mechanical Turk workers feel about being directly employed by a computer? Barowy has received positive feedback so far. When a human boss rejects your work, it can feel personal or unfair. But that's not the case with AutoMan. "People ended up liking the system because it's impartial," he says. The team presented the work at the OOPSLA conference in Tucson, Arizona, last month.
"Any programmer could pick this up and use it," says Michael Bernstein of Stanford University in California. "That's a really powerful thing." Bernstein has developed hybrid computational systems himself, such as Soylent, a word processor that uses crowd workers to edit text.
Barowy's team hopes that their system will make crowdsourcing mainstream, with software delegating tasks to human workers around the globe. "AutoMan might even help grow a new class of jobs that could become a new sector of the world economy," says team member Emery Berger, also at the University of Massachusetts.
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628945.500-your-next-boss-could-be-a-computer.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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