https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9109-1598
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgement
This article is part of a larger research project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘A Cultural and Intellectual History of Automated Labour,’ DP210102044.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The early history of mechanical figures in churches remains little known. Jessica Riskin provides the most detailed account in her ‘Machines in the Garden’ (Citation2010). See also E. R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Citation2015).
2 The following account of the Jaquet-Droz automata is based on archival documents preserved at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Neuchâtel, including contemporaneous reports and advertising materials, as well as interviews with the conservation staff. Some of this material is reproduced in the Museum catalogue Automates et Merveilles: Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot, edited by Junier and Künzi (Citation2012).
3 See also Kang (Citation2011).
4 Bernard Geoghegan’s ‘Orientalism and Informatics: Alterity from the Chess-Playing Turk to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’ (Citation2020), provides an excellent account of the exoticisation of Kempelen’s automaton, and the significance of its characterisation as a Turk.
5 These views are frequently expressed on forums such as https://www.mturkcrowd.com and https://forum.turkerview.com, which contain millions of posts from Turkers. Their views are generalised and anonymised here, for privacy.
6 The vast majority of contributors to these forums are American, although a wide variety of nationalities is represented.)
7 See Musée National des techniques (Citation1983), Stephens and Heffernan (Citation2016). and Stephens (Citation2019).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Stephens
Elizabeth Stephens is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication and Art at the University of Queensland. She is the author of three monographs: Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2017), co authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press 2011); and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (Palgrave 2009). She has recently completed an ARC Future Fellowship, examining practices of experimentation as a site of collaboration between the arts and sciences. She is the recipient of a current ARC Discovery Project on the cultural history of automation, with Sarah Collins, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr.