Amazon Mechanical Turk: The original man behind the curtain
While many tech executives have tried to underplay or disguise humanity’s hidden role in article intelligence, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos learned into the idea full tilt with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Reportedly named after an 18th century automated chess playing machine that was actually just a person hiding in a box, Mechanical Turk is a service researchers and data scientists can turn to complete simple tasks like image labeling, all for morsels of money. Those labeling task are trivially easy for humans but incredibly difficult for AI. Bezos reportedly referred to his new business at the time as “artificial artificial intelligence.”
“Normally, a human makes a request of a computer, and the computer does the computation of the task,” Bezos said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017. “But artificial artificial intelligences like Mechanical Turk invert all that. The computer has a task that is easy for a human but extraordinarily hard for the computer. So instead of calling a computer service to perform the function, it calls a human.”
