Mechanized Turks
Ayhan Aytes basically draws a connection between Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system in order to create a historical base from which he can implicate AMT as carrying out neoliberalism via the shared commonality of this cloaked cognitive labor performed in both models of comparison. The Chess Player presents the illusion of artificial intelligence and is a metaphor for the illusory quality of AMT’s system, the fact that the cognitive labor being performed is alluded to by referring to those cognitive worker’s as “mechanized turks” or “turkers” is a sly and problematic ping back to the orientalist roots of the Chess Player Automaton. Ironic or perhaps not (as is the way Neoliberalism works) that AMT is in name a continuation of the “Oriental” automaton that of current employs the cognitive labor of people from the Global South, most notably, Indian workers. The work is piecemeal and is similar in comparison to the chess player automaton due to the micro and macro elements at play in both systems; as chess is an intellectual and strategic game (originally from India too) and reliant on individual moves in order to achieve capture of the other player’s pieces. AMT is a system that relies on singular tasks being completed and does not involve the same worker in a unified or ongoing relationship to the work – I mean to say, it’s almost like an assembly line (using a factory metaphor here even though that is not totally relative) in that the worker is performing one task that goes towards a whole but that is not aware or connected to that whole process. This system differs from our ideas of Chess, as that game infers a level of awareness of all the potential roles or ways a piece could potentially affect the desired outcome of the game on a large scale – that is why the “Mechanical Turk” of the Chess Player Automaton was so intriguing and romanticized, even after it was discovered to be a hoax. This idea of mechanized intelligence represented infinite possibilities to the West, to be able to reap all the benefits of human intelligence, without the human. But the bottom line is that, technologically speaking, we are not there yet, and there is still a reliance on the human and their human intelligence, there is a person inside both systems that make them function, this is the crux of the analogy and also important to consider when thinking about what this kind of reductive labor practice as a trope (vis a vis a major corporate entity, Amazon) has on the cognitive worker’s it employs.
By presenting this labor being performed as automatized, and emanating from a machine or machines somewhere (in the case of AMT many of it’s Turker’s are outsourced from far outside of the Western Sociocultural environment) the labor and the considerations towards workers performing it are made invisible. Not only does the cognitive labor take place outside of the mechanization, but also takes places outside of the society it usually serves (this is an estimation, as I imagine that the main target is the American West.) What does this mean for the cognitive workers within the AMT system? What does it mean for the actual pieces of work that they perform? Aytes does a great job of breaking down how these cognitive workers fall into a “state of exception” as disembodied laborers within a neoliberal framework.
