Column: The Fall of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Is an Omen for the AI Age
For more than two decades, Amazon.com Inc.’s Mechanical Turk offered a similar illusion to its namesake. The 18th century chess-playing “machine” was actually a contraption controlled by a human hidden in a box. Amazon’s groundbreaking digital work platform did this at scale. Its Mechanical Turk was an army of hidden, anonymous workers carrying out a dizzying array of small mundane tasks for money.
More recently, though, the concept has been turned on its head. Where the goal used to hide the human in the machine, now it’s the humans hiding the machine’s existence. A growing number of Turkers, as these gig workers are known, have been passing off AI responses as their own. Given the low pay for tasks, this is understandable — relatable, maybe, to our own work and lives. It has also now helped render these workers obsolete.
The Fall of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Is an Omen for the AI Agebloomberg.comFor more than two decades, Amazon.com Inc.’s Mechanical Turk offered a similar illusion to its namesake. The 18th century chess-playing “machine” was actually a contraption controlled by a human hidden in a box. Amazon’s groundbreaking digital work platform did this at scale. Its Mechanical Turk was an army of hidden, anonymous workers carrying out a dizzying array of small mundane tasks for money.