Interesting, yet scary

Monkeyboy posted this link on his links page, Monkeyboy's Links.

Ok, now that you've got that, you can check out Amazon's beta Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

It seems like a pretty cool and interesting idea, from an academic perspective. From Amazon's info page:

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

So on the one side, you put this little snippet of code into the application you're writing, and on the other side Amazon negotiates the hand-shaking to some amorphous worldwide internet-enabled pool of people drones who appear to get paid for participating, and voila, you've got virtual cognitive processing. People acting like a massive parallel processing computer acting like a person. It's delightfully recursive. Academically speaking.

Because, call me a cynic, but the only application I see for this right now is to allow spammers to once again develop automated means of navigating through the various Turing tests in place that are only barely keeping comment spam at bay. I could have sworn that I read about basically the same thing (albeit on a smaller scale) that used a porn site as a proxy, getting the smut-seekers to fill in the test forms.

I can't help but think of Real Genius (perhaps this is a bad analogy?) and how cool ideas can always be twisted and used for nefarious purposes.

I dunno, maybe I'm not fully understanding what Amazon is trying to develop. And maybe I'm just underestimating people's capacity for good. But at least in the latter case, I generally find the opposite to be true.

On a more general note, why does it seem like every new thing elicits this "wow cool... gosh, that's kind of scary" response in me?

*sigh* Maybe I'm just getting old.

UPDATE: ok, I had a thought. Maybe the constraining factor I'm not taking into consideration is cost. Maybe it won't be cost effective for the service to be misused as I've described above. I guess we'll see.