Assignment 07
In “Return of the Crowds,” Ahyan Aytes makes a comparison between the Mechanical Turk with an 18th-century Automaton Chess Player. The connection that Aytes wants to make between a chess-playing machine and Amazon’s new platform is the idea of the relationship between the mind and intelligence of a human being and the intelligence we put forth into machines/technology.
The Mechanical Turk is Amazon.com’s micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform. The idea of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) came about because of the lack of success of the artificial intelligence systems they used to find copies of product pages on the website. Later, engineers were able to come up with the idea of using bodies to work behind computers to be able to operate a more efficient web-based system. It employs the intelligence of the worker and the machine to act as one to perform different tasks. I view it as when the mind can’t figure something out we go to the machine and vice versa.
Automaton Chess Player, created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, was made to give off a sense that a mannequin, that was being controlled, was able to play a great game of chess against any human player. It was all an illusion because there was an actual chess player that would hide inside and control the machine. It led to the idea that machines were also living beings, which I think further shows the connection that Aytes is trying to make.
Without human intelligence, technology would not exist. We, in some way, created this artificial intelligence. Technology needs the brainpower of humans in order to keep living on and advancing. However, there are certain things that we can’t do that technology can and certain things we can do that technology can’t. In the case of AMTs and the Automaton Chess Player, it is the human’s duty to take control when the technology isn’t intelligent enough to do so.
