5.26.2007
Digital Illiteracy Solved by the Masses
ars technica spotlighted a new innovation currently in the works. Remember all those countless online forms you've filled out in the past where you have to key in security word into the field? The security word is typically a stretched and skewed graphical word that appears in a box. The reason they do this is to prevent bots and spammers from creating fake accounts and/or garnering legitimate emails and personal information from the form itself. The system, in case you were wondering, is called the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). Now THAT'S an acronym.
Well, it would seem statistically that there are 150,000 man hours spent each day solving these little CAPTCHAs. All that work, simply to verify a form. Carnegie Mellon researchers raise the question, "What if those labor hours could be applied to something practical at the same time?" The result is a new campaign to replace the traditional CAPTCHA with reCAPTCHAs.
Instead of one word, you'll be given two. And while you do the typical form verification while filling it in, you'll also be helping a computer digitize a word that perhaps does not appear in a standard web format. Essentially you'll be helping the Internet learn to read different writings and words. This can improve the library of known words on the net and evolve the OCR (optical character recognition) apps being used across the web.
There's also some anti-spam potential and also a better way to fine-tune systems used to digitize books. Unfortunately, I was a bit unclear on that practicality. Perhaps the original blog I'm referencing would make things clearer to you.
In either case, it's exciting the possibility of using a mundane task to build up an automated computer system exponentially. The scary side, however, is that you're making OCRs that much more powerful. Hand-writing, slangs, and abbreviations will be just the beginning of what the net will be able to read. While there is some security benefits from this endeavor, it seems to me there's actually more danger. For instance, this could easily be a first step into using inconspicuous man(mind) power unbeknown to the user to evolve the intelligence of a machine, the first legitimate venture of using the masses for the betterment of artificial intelligence (AI).
Then we build robots. The robots become self-aware. The robots think they're better than us. The robots destroy most of us. We run away. The robots chase us. Oh wait, that sounds awesome. Never mind. Bring on the AI revolution!
Well, it would seem statistically that there are 150,000 man hours spent each day solving these little CAPTCHAs. All that work, simply to verify a form. Carnegie Mellon researchers raise the question, "What if those labor hours could be applied to something practical at the same time?" The result is a new campaign to replace the traditional CAPTCHA with reCAPTCHAs.
Instead of one word, you'll be given two. And while you do the typical form verification while filling it in, you'll also be helping a computer digitize a word that perhaps does not appear in a standard web format. Essentially you'll be helping the Internet learn to read different writings and words. This can improve the library of known words on the net and evolve the OCR (optical character recognition) apps being used across the web.
There's also some anti-spam potential and also a better way to fine-tune systems used to digitize books. Unfortunately, I was a bit unclear on that practicality. Perhaps the original blog I'm referencing would make things clearer to you.
In either case, it's exciting the possibility of using a mundane task to build up an automated computer system exponentially. The scary side, however, is that you're making OCRs that much more powerful. Hand-writing, slangs, and abbreviations will be just the beginning of what the net will be able to read. While there is some security benefits from this endeavor, it seems to me there's actually more danger. For instance, this could easily be a first step into using inconspicuous man(mind) power unbeknown to the user to evolve the intelligence of a machine, the first legitimate venture of using the masses for the betterment of artificial intelligence (AI).
Then we build robots. The robots become self-aware. The robots think they're better than us. The robots destroy most of us. We run away. The robots chase us. Oh wait, that sounds awesome. Never mind. Bring on the AI revolution!
Labels: AI, Internet, OCR, spam, technology
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