Hybrid Assignment 07
In “Return of the Crowds,” Ahyan Aytes explains how the name/brand of Amazon.com’s micro-payment-based crowd sourcing platform, Mechanical Turk, was borrowed from one of the 18th century Automaton Chess Player’s name. Amazon established its Mechanical Turk in 2005 after it faced the problem of identifying and finding duplicate product pages on its retail websites, which its artificial intelligence program was supposed to do but failed to do so. This led Amazon.com to hire humans for the completion of this task (which is very easy for humans to do but difficult for machines/computers).
Ahyan Aytes’s connection between Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the automaton chess player can be explained through the way the Kempelen’s chess player assistant hid under the cabinet as he manipulated the Turk mannequin, giving the impression that the Turk mannequin was actually the one playing chess and beating other players like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. This is similar to how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk works. Employers/requesters post human intelligence tasks (HITs) that machines/computers cannot perform. The workers or “turkers” then can choose from the tasks posted, complete the tasks (which do not require a lot of time to do), and get paid (from free to several US dollars) when their work is accepted. Just like in the automaton chess player, it may appear like the computer or application is performing the tasks for the employers, when in fact, it’s humans behind their computer screens (who employers cannot see) actually completing the tasks.
