Hybrid Response #7 – Ayhan Aytes
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.
