#453 Drones

Either Marijuana is getting stronger or hippies are getting stupider. The other day I saw this guy on the street and he was trying to hook a pair of shoes over a telephone wire. All well and good. Except they were loafers. He seemed like the perfect candidate for a new job service I heard about lately. It’s this place you can go on the internet that hires you to do jobs too menial for a computer. Now follow me on this one. Remember when computers burst on American society and how it was much ballyhooed that they would save humans from the drudgery of meaningless tasks. That they would calculate all the prime numbers for us and do the tedious math equations that once blistered scientists’ fingers on slide rules. Flash forward to 2007. Seems there are plenty of jobs that computers aren’t good at. And reminding you that your books are late at the library in a throat cancer victim’s voice is just one of them. Things like face recognition and picking numbers out of background scenery—like, say, the address of your house in a surveillance picture taken because you made an oblique reference to blowing up the powers that be in a humor essay. These are tasks that computers simply suck at. And that human beings, even those stoned enough to try to hook a pair of loafers on a telephone wire, can manage quite well—all for less than the price of a Snickers. This website, MTurk.com, pays people pennies a task. Do enough of them and you can work your way up to the price of a Hostess Cupcake or a Twinkie. And it’s just the thing to while away the hours in a dark room reeking of petuli. The website isn’t saying but I ‘m guessing the human-computer drones are also capable of recognizing those squiggly bent numbers other websites are always using as spam filters or password protectors. Is this a great country or what? Spam companies hiring human drones to work around the limitations of computer pattern recognition so they can use computers to send you spam. And what do you want to bet some of that spam gets right back to the human drones. And that’s not all, seems that internet gaming is a big deal and more than just your stay-up-all-night geeks are involved in it. I hear that soon ESPN is going to be featuring online video game tournaments. No doubt sponsored by such geek-friendly brands as Doritos and Red Bull. But, since some worker bees actually have to live ordinary lives, they are hiring basement dwellers to play games all day long and all night too for them, to get them to the next level in their online games. Play through all the boring stuff and get the next talisman or weapon or power upgrade. So I ask again, is this a great country or what? Normal, thoughtful, decent, hardworking Americans hiring other people to play their games for them. Honey, I’m tired, could you have the kid down the street play my game for me? I gotta turn on the Superbowl.
America, ya gotta love it