The mechanical Turk: a short history of 'artificial artificial intelligence'.
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and whic...
| Published in: | Cultural Studies Vol. 37; no. 1; pp. 65 - 88 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jan2023
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=161309805&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 161309805 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 09502386 05G jtl: Cultural Studies issn: 09502386 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jan2023 vid: 37 iid: 1 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 161309805 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580 ppf: 65 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 3MB tig: atl: The mechanical Turk: a short history of 'artificial artificial intelligence'. aug: au: Stephens, Elizabeth affil: University of Queensland, Brisbane su: Artificial intelligence Intellect Machine theory Cognition Automation sug: subj: Artificial intelligence Intellect Machine theory Cognition Automation keyword: artificial artificial intelligence automata cognitive labour Human Intelligence Tasks Mechanical Turk microwork platforms ab: This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world's first 'thinking machine,' deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon's Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called 'artificial artificial intelligence,' Amazon's Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen's automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Cultural Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Cultural Studies holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2023 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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