S.Jeannot – Hybrid Assignment 7
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.
