Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely used, and we can rely on AI to help us achieve many tasks that we never thought of in the past.
Artificial intelligence perceives, learns, reasons, and corrects, performing complex and tedious tasks that help humans break through the limits of past research and applications. Among the many artificial intelligences, the most mature and often used is Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
Origins of MTurk
MTurk is a late 18th century automatic chess playing device, so named because of its appearance of a traditional oriental wizard wearing a Turkish robe and a turban on his head. It was invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen of Austria to please the Archduke Maria Theresia and was said to be able to defeat human chess players. Napoleon and Franklin were no match for him. His most famous stunt is the “Knight’s tour”, which means to move through every square of the board according to the knight’s rule in backgammon, and each grid can only be passed once.
But it was later proven to be a scam that actually allowed a human player with superior chess skills to hide inside and operate the machine to play chess.
After Kempelen’s death, his son sold the robot to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who patrolled Europe and the Americas, including Milan, Italy, England, New York, and Havana, Cuba, etc. After Maelzel’s death, the robot went into the hands of John Orr, Mitchell, and others, and eventually ended up in Charles Wilson Peale’s Chinese Museum, where it was destroyed in an accidental fire.
Applications
The earliest application of robots in Turkey came from Amazon, where a manager named Venky Harinarayan came up with a “human-machine hybrid computing deployment” in 2005, as the name implies, using human machines to work with humans to achieve goals. For example, in the past, the descriptions of pictures on the Internet needed to be written by humans, but now they are written by artificial intelligence and then verified by humans. In other words, tasks that are highly repetitive and less complex can be done by machines for humans first, and then return to humans for subsequent complex tasks.
Turkish robots break down tasks into small units or subtasks and then assign them to a network of workers to perform follow-up work. The group of people assigned to the job is called “Turker”.
The advantages of this invention include: increased efficiency, flexibility and reduced costs. In addition to Amazon, other large technology companies such as Google and Twitter have also created a group of robots to review news and information, evaluate products, and test new software.
“Turkers” are distributed all over the world, with most American Turkers being female and most Indian Turkers being male. There are approximately 15,000 to 20,000 active Turkers each month, working anywhere from just a few minutes to 24 hours a day. However, most Turkers earn less than the U.S. federal minimum wage per hour.
Hidden Worries
Although the application of AI has increased human work efficiency and enabled more meaningful work, it has also blurred employee commuting times. In addition, it has prompted large corporations to outsource jobs to lower-cost labor countries, widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
As mentioned above, most of the workers in the Turker industry earn less than the U.S. federal minimum wage per hour, leaving them with no stable income, no career prospects, and no security in their lives. All these are the sacrifices behind the development of human technology, and the various derivative issues deserve careful consideration by the government when planning national policies.
Derivative Reading
More analysis of MTurk workers can be found below:
Stone, A. A., M. Walentynowicz, S. Schneider, D. U. Junghaenel and C. K. Wen (2019). “MTurk Participants Have Substantially Lower Evaluative Subjective Well-Being Than Other Survey Participants.” Comput Human Behav 94: 1-8.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417833/
References:
- Untold History of AI: When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk The famed 19th-century engineer may have been inspired by an early example of AI chicanery and hype. OSCAR SCHWARTZ. 18 MAR 2019https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-charles-babbage-and-the-turk
- Amazon: https://www.mturk.com/
- BBC News
- Pubmed
- Cover image is from pixabay.com
