Maciej Ceglowski, on the Internet of Things, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the role humans might play as AI takes over the world:

My favorite Internet of Things device is a fan called the Ethical Turk that subverts the whole idea of scriptable people.

This clever fan (by the brilliant Simone Rebaudengo) recognizes moral dilemmas and submits them to a human being for adjudication. Conscious of the limits of robotkind, it asks people for ethical help.

For example, if the fan detects that there are two people in front of it, it won’t know which one to cool.

So it uploads a photograph of the situation to Mechanical Turk, which assigns the task to a human being. The human makes the ethical decision and returns an answer along with a justification. The robot obeys the answer, and displays the justification on a little LCD screen.

The fan has dials on the side that let you select the religion and educational level of the person making the ethical choice.

My favorite thing about this project is how well it subverts Amazon’s mechanization of labor by using human beings for the one thing that makes them truly human. People become a kind of ethics co-processor