Before AI, there was the Mechanical Turk: The chess machine that wasn’t
The article explores the history of the 18th-century 'Mechanical Turk' chess machine, which was actually operated by a hidden human player. It draws a parallel between this historical deception and modern 'artificial artificial intelligence' crowdsourcing platforms.
Why it matters
It provides historical context for the current debate on AI, illustrating that the concept of human-assisted automation is not a new phenomenon.
Long before ‘artificial intelligence’ became a regular part of the everyday lexicon, Amazon came up with the concept of “artificial artificial intelligence,” or, in other words, work that appeared to be automated but, in reality, was completed by humans.Amazon brought this type of work to the masses via its crowdsourcing marketplace called Mechanical Turk. Launched in 2005, the marketplace offered up a wide variety of tasks that humans were still better at completing than their computer-based counterparts.Mechanical Turk got its name from an 18th-century chess-playing machine that had appeared to play the game of chess with great intelligence and skill.The Mechanical Turk first appeared in 1770, when the inventor and civil servant Wolfgang von Kempelen showed his contraption to the Habsburg court of Empress Maria Theresa.
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