Reading Response #7

to Artful Design • Chapter 7: “Social Design”

Oluseyi O.

11/12/2023

Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University

Reading Response: Mechanical Turks and the Million Man Instrument

From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to the concept of the Mechanical Turk, which is a machine "purported to do a fully automated task, but that is actually done by a human behind the scenes. This also ties into Principle 7.9, which states “use technology to harness the power of the human”. The idea is to use humans to make up for machine’s faults in a sense; there are tasks easier for humans than machines and by putting humans in the loop, using “human computation”, it’s easier to perform tasks such as labeling images and identifying objects. Then a computer can compile those labels and identifications for the purposes of creating a database for example.

The term “human computation” is used in the book and I find this entire concept a bit unnerving in truth. It at least seems as if it is on a slippery slope towards being something more dystopian or negative for humanity. Since Amazon was brought up, I am reminded of patents Amazon made for machines that utilize human operators as living and sensing appendages and extensions of machines, furthering worker exploitation. These patents are discussed in this journal.  The idea of gamifying human computation via games with a purpose is also a little frightening; as it could create a situation where people are being used for human computation without even knowing it. The examples in the chapter also indicate that this gamification is very, very effective. 

Still, I have perhaps just consumed too much dystopian media. I think the idea of using technology and these types of human computation design to create experiences that truly connect humanity across the world is inspiring, such as the Leaf Trombone World Stage. At the end of the chapter, social karaoke is brought up alongside the example of Mayo from Japan, who incited a harmony of 4,000 voices singing “Lean On Me” in unison after the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and aftershock hit Japan. It got me wondering what could be done to create a million man, worldwide harmony as brought up at the end of the chapter. Perhaps every person could provide a single note or pitch and submit it ala the sheep? Maybe like the ESP game, two people hear the preceding phrase of the created melody or song and work together to select the next note or lyric? I don’t think such an “instrument” could be truly synchronous, but it would be truly amazing if it could.

Overall, I think the ideas of human computation and integrating humans into technology seem intimidating to me personally, but there is nonetheless a lot of value and beauty that can be designed from it. Ultimately, we are already quite integrated with technology and have to best figure out how to use it, rather than shun it or run away from it.