In 1770 a chess-playing machine called The Turk toured Europe, beat emperors and…
In 1770 a chess-playing machine called The Turk toured Europe, beat emperors and generals, and astonished a century.
There was a man inside it.
In 2005 Amazon opened a platform and gave it that name on purpose: Mechanical Turk. Bezos described it as "artificial artificial intelligence", the computer appears to do the work; people do it, out of sight.
Last week Amazon said the platform closes on 30 September, after 21 years.
A great deal of the AI we use today was trained on work done there. Labelling images, transcribing audio, answering surveys, judging whether a sentence is abusive, a few cents a task, hundreds of tasks a day. Amazon advertised over 500,000 registered workers. Researchers who went looking found that only a few thousand were typically working at any one moment. Even the headcount is a fog, which is the point: this layer was never meant to be seen.
Researchers who went looking found that only a few thousand were typically working at any one moment.
They are not needed now. The machines they taught can do the job they were doing.
I don't want to make this a sad story. I want to point at the order of things: every time something looks like the computer simply knowing, go down a few layers and you usually find people. And those people rarely leave their names on it.
I once told my son that AI doesn't know things, it was taught them, and that the teaching was done by people. He asked me what those people do now.
I couldn't answer.
I think that question is better than "will AI replace me". The second asks about the future. The first asks about right now, and it already has an answer, one nobody says out loud.
Do you talk to your children about that layer, or do you assume they'll work it out?
