Human brains as spare parts.

Having an infinite pool of qualified networked workers, i.e. the crowd, allows applications to use them as interchangeable parts. Humanoid, a new cloud-based crowdsourcing service, enforces performance standards among anonymous brain "suppliers".

Nov 2, 2011. VBeat. ”We launched SpeakerText, and it took us about a year and a half to get actual quality results from Mechanical Turk,” Mireles told VentureBeat. The problem, Mireles said, is that it was extremely difficult to ensure the quality of an anonymous, distributed workforce. For every dollar the team spent on labor on Mechanical Turk, it had to spend two dollars on quality assurance and cleanup.

Using statistics to predict how accurately a task will be completed based on a worker’s past performance, Humanoid is able to judge whether a worker is showing signs of fatigue, or if other factors could be interfering with the completion of a task. When these warning signs arise, the job is rerouted to another distributed worker who can meet the company’s standards, so no time is lost fixing work that is not up to snuff.

 The system would make Frederick W. Taylor very proud.

tags: control, cloud, information, commerce, 10X, problem, solution