The paradox of the Mechanical Turk
Published in
2 min readJun 16, 2023
The original Mechanical Turk was an elaborate fraud from 1770: supposedly a chess-playing machine, but that actually had a human player within.
Centuries later, Amazon launched Amazon Mechanical Turk, whereby humans volunteer to perform difficult-to-automate services or “micro-jobs” known as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs, charging generally very small amounts per unit processed. These types of jobs…