å Tuesday, October 27th, 2015

To understand the connection Ahyan Aytes makes between Mechanical Turk and the 18th-century automaton chess player, first it is imperative to note that Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Automaton Chess Player was not, to use Edgar Allen Poe’s term, a “pure machine,” rather the choices of the automaton were controlled by Kempelen’s living assistant. The automaton’s dependence on human intelligence to operate is the model behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. At the automaton’s introduction it was understood to be teachable and under control of its human owner, but it was also a technology that people did not fully understand, in-between thinking of it as a living being and not fully grasping a machine operating when presented with variables. Even the use of the automaton to use the game of chess, it was understood that the finite number of chess moves could be made into code to control mechanics. Through its ability to make human thought like a machine and machine operate like human thought, it had great potential for the future in an industrial cognitive capitalism, in which Amazon later embraced.

If the automaton could make human decisions, a commodity that had always solely belonged to humans until that point, numerous machines operating to replace the need for human thought would decrease the value of the human thought and human action. This, through Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform of Mechanical Turk is exactly what happened. By exploiting labor laws by crossing global boarders and spreading thin the tasks of large jobs through the efforts of thousands of human workers, the work is disguised as if it were done solely by automation (like Kempelen’s Automaton), though truly done by people. The workers now are paid pennies for their unreplicatable (but easily replaceable) efforts. This is the connection Aytes makes between the automaton and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

In return of the crowds, Aytes compares Amazon’s micropayment based crowdsourcing platform by comparing it to an 18th Century Automaton Chess Player. Crowdsourcing platforms utilize the public to complete business related tasks that it would ordinarily do for itself. Aytes tries to get us to think about how this has replaced traditional forms of employment. While the labor may not always be free, it still costs less than paying a traditional employee, hence the appeal to corporations. She uses the example of an Indian Human Intelligence Task worker (HIT) and how he made only $572 for 10,000 HIT’s despite having a 98.2% approval rate. While many may argue that he could choose not to do the job, they are overlooking the fact that the corporations target poorer countries so that people are more inclined to do the job for a meager compensation. Aytes states “U.S based Turkers oppose exploitation claims and state their interest in Mechanical Turk is solely motivated by the novelty of the experience. This fact could be explained through the seemingly negligible amount of income that can be earned through AMT for a U.S. based worker.” Crowdsourcing therefore has more benefits for U.S. workers than for those outsourced from other countries.
Aytes also touches on the fact that these workers from other countries are sometimes forced to work much more hours than the typical U.S worker. For example, in Germany, German “guest workers” were expected to work 80 hour work weeks in order to supply the labor needs for post war Germany. These guest workers were paid less than domestic workers and were exploited outside of normal legislations, rights and union protections. All this is done to exploit time zone differences so that businesses can have the needs of their company met 24/7.
The connection Aytes is trying to make to the reader is that both systems are similar. In the Chess Player example, the audience is deceived into believing that there is a sophisticated mechanism capable of playing chess against humans, when in fact it is a person controlling the mechanism. In crowdsourcing, we often think we are dealing with an intelligent computerized program, when in fact there is a person working behind the scene to meet our needs. These businesses want us to believe that technology has advanced to a place where infinite amount of things can be done by a computer program, but it is in fact a deception because there is always a human manpower working to make these things happen.

Ayhan Aytes’ explanation of’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk by its comparison to the 18th-century Automaton Chess Player, was quite clear – the crowd doesn’t see all the work the people who work for these big, multinational powerhouse crowdsourcing apparatus, rather the false image that has come to be the comfortable and familiar way of interacting with the apparatus, that you don’t see them working furiously behind the scenes.

Immediately, this reminded of the Wiz (or the Wizard of Oz, too); where Richard Pryor is this frail looking man, though to be this great, magnificent power.  He sits way atop his skyscraper, hidden away from everyone else and working furiously behind the scenes, operating the machine by buttons and levers. inside the big head (that is in his audience chamber as his public face).  He does all of this to maintain the personification of what the people believe him to be – though it is all a facade.

the truth is that, these crowdsourcing apparati are intricately linked to the multitudes that offer bit intellectual labor.  The apparatus could not exist without this very type of relationship.  It makes the illusion of effortlessness possible.  The mechanical mind that people see as the power of the Mechanical Turk, is not mechanical at all, rather it is the intellectual power and labor of all the intellectual workers supporting the machine.  Humanity has had a long standing attraction to the idea of the autonomous mechanical mind, but the realization of a viable automated intelligence still has not become a functioning reality, but this frame work seems to be slow falling into place through the crowdsourcing apparatus – a psuedo artifical intelligence, powered by the human element.

The connection Aytes wants to make between a chess playing machine and Amazon.com’s new digital labor market, Mechanical Turk, is that both the human component (the mind) and technology itself are very intertwined.

Amazon moved to the Mechanical Turk due to the fact that it’s technology could not find “duplicate product pages on its retail website” and needed the cognitive labor. The Turk mannequin that Wolfgang von Kempelen created was an attempt at technology competing against actual human opponents in serious chess matches. The “technology” ended up being his chess master assistant.

With both, the most important aspect is knowledge. There are certain tasks that only humans can perform, but if somehow humans can manipulate technology to perform these tasks then in the long run it’s for the best. In her article, she talks about how “mechanisms were also living beings.” This intertwining of both technology and the human component, more specifically the human mind, makes me believe that one cannot exist without the other. Humans are the ones that created technology and although some of the world’s brightest minds (Musk and Hawking to name a few) believe that artificial intelligence will be an issue for us in the future, all of that could not be possible if it was not for the human component.

This article seems to say that technology is part of the evolution process of the human mind. With the Turk, Kempelen’s chess master assistant was the actual computer or technology that dealt with coded actions and each chess piece assigned a role that had a limited power. This is very similar to the technology that Amazon.com created in the AMT (Amazon Mechanical Turk) as technology can only do so much and there needs to be a human component. The human component and technology are supported by knowledge and has become more and more intertwined with all the new technology in our time. Their functions are used in almost every facet of our everyday life and will continue to do so.