Fidel Gastro’s

Skynet, Transformers, Yo Sushi. All examples when we hand over control to the machines we end up in the shit. Giant transforming conveyor belt sushi robots from the future is what we are going to have to contend with and I say enough. Enough with all the robots and enough with overpriced crappy fatty tuna nigiri.

More than meets the eye

But we are almost there; we have surrendered ourselves to our robot overlords as more and more we are becoming agents of the machines, performing actions the robots at Google HQ cannot do. Tagging images on flickr, labelling videos on Youtube - these are all things not even the T-1000 can perform and what many internet companies are actively encouraging us to do.

Amazon goes once step further and actually pays for this; their Mechanical Turk site allows their automated systems to dish out micro-jobs to humans who are bored and willing to name automotive parts for 5 cents an image. This quite innovative idea is actually named after a wonderous chess playing contraption which wowed and astounded the royal courts of Austria in the 18th Century but turned out just to be a dwarf locked in a cupboard.

The Mechanical Turk. Not the mechanical turkey - a top secret government project.

Today there is enough of us for the computers to treat us as a resource and Google’s latest project - Image Labeler is another example of this as they aim to index everything. Image Labeler works as a little game to keep our simple brains entertained; you are paired with another human somewhere around the world and each are shown the same image from Google Images. You then have 30 seconds to describe the image and if you both ended up typing the same thing you get a number of points and therefore Google know what the image is of. Cracking. But this was just the beginning…

My subserviant deviant side was instantly tweaked and I spent quite a while labeling every single image I was shown with some euphemism for penis. Cock, wang, dick, schlong, johnson - the works - all the vain hope that I’m playing the game with someone with the same mindset as me, we’d type the same knob reference and end up mislabelling images of dishwashers, John Wayne and a caravan as something to do with willys.

Not a dong.

The ultimate goal is that when some perv is searching Google Images for pics of dicks, they’d be utterly baffled when returned assorted pictures of Northern India, a furby and 2 pints of milk rather than the wieners they were looking for. I can sense their disappointment already.