Hybrid 7
The connection Aytes was trying to make between the chess playing machine from the 18th century also known as The Turk and Amazon’s new platform Mechanical Turk was the similarities in the motivations behind the creation as well as the function. In 2005, Amazon formed their application called Mechanical Turk (AMT) and a digital labor market was established. Human intelligence tasks (HIT) were presented and workers are paid anywhere from one cent to a few dollars to do tasks as Aytes mentions, “such as transcribing audio, answering surveys, translating text, and gathering information on products.” AMT uses real people instead of artificial intelligence systems to do the work and pays them less than 10,000 a year. 33% of the workers are from India, which makes a big part of their business conducted internationally.
Compared and named after the chess-playing machine from the 18th century, Mechanical Turk, it impressed many and served as a form of entertainment. The machine was a robot, an automaton that stood over a chessboard and made the audience believe it could play the best game of chess against humans. However it was all an elaborate lie with a human operator controlling the moves giving the illusion that the machine can predict the next move.
She calls Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a “reincarnation” of the chess-playing automaton. Chess-playing machine was a fraud and had someone controlling it from behind the “curtain”. This same concept is being applied to our computers today through Amazon’s mechanical Turk. Tasks and programming is being done through crowdsourcing from regular amateurs, not necessarily computer programmers. Requesters, the companies, are paying out different hourly wages for different tasks. People gravitate to these jobs, however it is difficult to make a living from this small monetary compensation. The labor performance of workers is important and controlled by the digital networks to make a profit for major companies. Multinational companies are using crowdsourcing to maximize on these profits.
Chess playing machine much like the computers we use today has made the audience believe it had power but in reality it all lies behind the scenes. This machine was theorizing the system of labor, almost grooming the mind for production while there are people conducting the work for miniscule compensation.
