The Mechanical Turk was a machine built in 1770, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, that supposedly beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin at chess. It toured for 84 years before being destroyed in a fire and, although many suspected it was a scam, it was only revealed to have been a hoax as late as 1834. It seems obvious now, but it was essentially a box with a person inside. Today, we call this the AI revolution.
AI is one of the most hyped technologies of my lifetime, and yet its real-world results either don't work, are inaccurate, annoying, and/or thoroughly depressing. Supposedly fully-automated AI-tech is frequently revealed to be no more than thousands of low-paid workers in a trench coat.
Amazon's online remote labour marketplace even takes the name "Mechanical Turk" for its business. Tens of thousands of remote workers doing "automated" tasks the AI can't. This "ghost work", from data labelling to content moderation, pays as little as £1.45 per hour.
Tech companies are using workers, often in the global south, to impersonate chat bots, drive automated cars and shepherd "autonomous" delivery bots. In 2017, the app Expensify admitted using human labour, outsourced through Amazon Mechanical Turk, to transcribe receipts it said were processed using “smartscan technology”.
This is all part of Big Tech's fake-it-til-you-make-it approach to technology. Where pretending to invent something first is more important than actually inventing anything. Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's humanoid Optimus robots last month, fully autonomous robo-servants!* (Remote-controlled by human workers)
Tech bros are the 18th century industrialists of our age, and their machines will increase profits while they maim and exploit workers like the cotton mills of the industrial revolution. But from an economic standpoint it barely matters that AI doesn't "work" in the ways it has been sold. If it works enough to depress wages, and allow more jobs to be shipped overseas, it will be seen by the people that matter as a roaring success.
Excellent as always