Evans: Big internet platforms operate as Mechanical Turks powered by human biases

“You should think of any big internet platform as basically a Mechanical Turk. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. Because PageRank, the whole point of PageRank is instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, Probably should have said this earlier. Instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, we look at all, what all the humans have done. And so we will use the human activity. People will tell us. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. The same as Instagram, same as YouTube by extension. YouTube doesn't know what that video is. It knows who watched it, what else they watch, what they wrote, what they liked, what they didn't. It's observing people. And so you either build, you know, YouTube, PageRank captures existing human behavior. YouTube and Facebook obviously stimulate new human behavior. But what you're always doing in effect is that you've built this vast computing system in which the people are the computers. You've got this vast distributed computing system in which you have four billion CPUs, which is all of us. And therefore the bugs and the exploits are the exploits in us. There are cognitive biases.”

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