Disclaimer: I work on the PR2 day-to-day.

Believe it or not... It is fairly trivial to consume _all_ computational resources on the robot. A few examples of concurrently running tasks: AMCL SLAM (mapping); assembling incoming laser scans and transforming them to various frames; multiple occupancy grids (obstacle detection / planning) at various resolutions; 3D point-cloud perception for object recognition, person tracking, or 3D mapping; motion-planning controllers for mobility (base) or manipulation (arms) running at 100+ Hz; computer vision algorithms; the list goes on...

It is possible to offload some of these tasks (especially high-level planning or recognition tasks) to people via MechTurk or the cloud (see "Cloud Robotics"). However, there will always be some computation that needs to occur with real-time constraints -- which likely means on-robot.

The _big deal_ in the last 2 years is ROS. ROS has changed everything, and is causing robotics to accelerate! Now, if you need one of those previously mentioned tools... they're open source, well documented, and ready to use.

Robots need a lot more computing power than a desktop PC, maybe even more than a current supercomputer, because the computer off-loads the hard parts of interacting with the world to people. In a sense, you could consider programmers and users robot peripherals that let less powerful computers get more done.

A mechanical turk powered "machine" sounds like an absolutely fascinating experiment.

The tricky bit would be designing an interface for turkers to manipulate the robot.

The other complicated bit is making sure the turkers can't cause serious harm. (We don't want turkers controlling UAVs...)

That is actually something I have been thinking about recently. People spend hours upon hours playing games that resemble, to some degree, real jobs. (Think FarmVille, CafeWorld, etc.)

If you could craft the game in such a way to provide the control to the robots for things that are not easily automated, people's entertainment would provide the labour required to control the operation for free. A capitalistic dream.

Sorting recycling comes to mind. The manual labor version of it involves standing over a slow moving belt of stinky trash and picking out the valuable recyclables.

Seems like a Fanuc with a suction gripper and a hires web cam is all it might take to get a little "trashville" going. Give the housewives who collect the most alu while the kids are away at school day passes to local spas as prizes and you've got a win.

The user should hide in the cabinet underneath the chessboard.

Very astute. I think you hit it dead on. The robot revolution will be about outsourcing menial tasks to cheaper humans, not super-duper AI. It's really more of the network revolution continued into servos, not a "robot revolution".

Isn't the world in an awful state when we value other humans' contributions on a lower level than robots. Not saying it hasn't been in the past, but one would have thought the wondrous fruits of Capitalism would have got us past that stage by now...

The Mturker's value for his time is set by him, not "us". If he doesn't derive enough value from doing the HITs to give a pile of servos on the other side of the world its smarts, then he doesn't have to.

The reality is that a human can still do in a few seconds what it takes a rack full of S3 instances an hour to do. Yes, the human's contribution costs less in absolute terms and is readily available so is valued less.

Where the value to the turker and the value to the employer meet in the middle, you get the wondrous fruits of capitalism (small 'c', not a religion).

The fruits of Capitalism can only blossom where the seeds are planted and nurtured.