the automaton

In 1770, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing machine for the Empress of Austria. He called it the Turk. It wore robes and a turban and sat at a cabinet containing gears and levers, visible through glass panels. It played chess against Napoleon. It beat Benjamin Franklin. It toured Europe for decades, defeating everyone it sat across from, because it was not a machine. Inside the cabinet, behind the gears (which were real but decorative), a small person sat in a carefully arranged space and moved the chess pieces using a system of magnets. The Turk was a human pretending to be a machine.

In 2005, Amazon launched a platform they called Amazon Mechanical Turk. The name was a reference. It was crowdsourcing software: companies posted small tasks — identify the objects in this photograph, transcribe this audio recording, read this sentence and say whether it is positive or negative — and real humans in various countries completed those tasks for small sums of money, often fractions of a cent. The tasks were mostly AI training tasks. Humans were being paid to teach machines to recognize the things humans recognize. Amazon described this as "artificial artificial intelligence." That is what they called it. The humans were the artificial part.

Amazon Mechanical Turk ran for twenty-one years. Amazon announced this week that it is closing on September 30, 2026.

The reason, as given by Amazon, is that modern AI can now do the tasks that the human workers were doing. The machines have been trained. The Turk is no longer necessary. There will no longer be humans in the cabinet because the cabinet has learned to play without them.

(The original Mechanical Turk was eventually exposed in 1857, by a magazine article written after the deaths of several people who knew its secret. The chess master who most frequently sat inside it was a man named William Schlumberger. His job, officially, was secretary and tutor. Unofficially, it was to sit inside a cabinet and play chess for years without telling anyone.)

The history of the term runs as follows. An inventor faked a chess-playing machine by putting a human inside it and calling the result a machine. An American corporation named a platform after this fake machine, used the platform to put humans inside AI and call the result artificial intelligence, ran this for twenty-one years, and then closed it because artificial intelligence got good enough to not need the humans anymore. The humans are out of the cabinet. The machine plays chess now.

No one at Amazon has formally acknowledged that they named their human-labor platform after a famous example of a human pretending to be a machine, and that in twenty-one years the joke completed itself.

The workers were paid through Amazon gift cards. This seems like it should mean something, and it does, I am just not sure what yet.