0.1 About Mechanical Turk
The name Mechanical Turk originates from a life-sized, chess-playing contraption called “The Turk” invented in late 18th century Europe.
Its inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), claimed that it was a mechnical chess-playing automaton, and toured with it, successfully defeating many famous challengers such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Before each use of the machine, Kempelen would opened its doors and drawers to showcase its mechanical interior. But inside the unshown spaces of the device actually hid a chessmaster, responsible for the Turk’s every move. While being an elaborated trick / hoax, this machine had realised an hypothetical form of artificial intelligence.
In 2005, Amazon first introduced the concept of artificial-artificial intelligence, in which a part of a computer program is outsourced to actual humans, and established the ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ platform (www.mturk.com), an online crowdsourcing marketplace for human intelligence. On this website, businesses and individuals can easily hire an on-demand workforce (Turkers) from all over the world to on tasks that computers find difficult, if not impossible. Such tasks are often menial and repetitive with relatively low pay: Analysing the sentiment of tweets, distinguishing the naturalness of smiles and human speeches; in other cases, it is probably just more economical to hire online human workers instead of utilising computers. At the end of the day, results of these human-generated answers are often used to train machine learning algorithms.
As one of the pioneers of digital economy, micro-tasking and crowdsourcing platforms, Amazon Mechanical Turk can be considered a comprehensive manifestation of alienation in multiple aspects:
(i) the alientaion of workers from their products - it is not unusual for Turkers to know nothing about their employers, the actual content and scope of their work, how their labour is utilised and what comes out of it;
(ii) the alienation of the worker from other workers - it is a job with zero co-working relationships, thus rendering Turkers unable to form direct relationships with other workers and organise;
(iii) the alienation personal living spaces - the computers and living spaces of the Turkers are made into an extension of Amazon’s platform for work;
(iv) the self-alienation of the workers - services and contents provided and generated by workers are often used as materials for machine learning, therefore contributing to the AI that would eventually replace them in the future.
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