One of the wonders of the late eighteenth century was a chess-playing automaton—that is, an entirely automated machine—most commonly known as “the Turk.” Constructed in 1770 by the great inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, it took the form of a figure wearing Turkish dress seated at a wooden cabinet with a chessboard on top. Opening the cabinet revealed some fiendishly complex clockwork, which apparently powered the Turk and allowed it to play a game of chess against any willing human: a challenge many of Europe’s most celebrated figures accepted.
Almost all were defeated. Considered one of the great enigmas of its age, the Turk could even detect attempts at cheating by its opponents, beating Napoleon himself in 1809 despite the French emperor’s efforts at foul play. It was, of course, a hoax—albeit of the most ingenious kind.
As was eventually discovered in the 1820s, the cabinet beneath the Turk was designed like a magician’s box, concealing a diminutive human chess master who worked with the Turk’s operator to create the illusion of a chess-playing machine—aided by magnetic counters underneath the chessboard, corresponding to the position of every piece, and a complex mechanism for moving the Turk’s mechanical arm to pick up and place pieces on the board.78
The original Turk was destroyed by fire in 1854, but its name lives on today in one of the more ingenious forms of crowdsourcing to be found online: Amazon’s very own “mechanical Turk” service.
Launched in 2005, Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web-based service that invites users to register themselves as mechanical Turks: that is, to become the equivalent of the chess master crouched within the eighteenth-century mechanism. Other people then use the service and its legions of registered Turks to perform tasks that even today cannot automatically and efficiently be performed by machines: tasks such as correctly identifying the objects in a photograph, or potential sightings of missing persons.
Mechanical Turks working for Amazon earn a small amount of money for each “Human Intelligence Task” or HIT performed, with tasks ranging from the cheap and simple (“View two images and determine whether they are the same kind of place, such as bathroom, forest or street” at 2 cents per answer) to the somewhat more involved and lucrative (“Check Webpage for Irrelevant Products” for a whole dollar). All of which is performed under the delightful slogan “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”79
The possibilities of mechanical Turks have inspired fictional as well as commercial imaginations, with one of the more striking ideas for their use featuring in science fiction author Cory Doctorow’s 2010 novel For the Win. Set in a near-future of vastly complex online multiplayer games, one character, a boy called Leonard, earns money working as a Mechanical Turk for the (fictional) corporation Coca-Cola Games.
Rather than simply performing rote tasks, Leonard’s role is effectively as a digital actor, taking over control of a nonplayer character (NPC) within the game whenever it encounters a situation beyond the parameters of a pre-prepared script: when, for example, another human player is behaving strangely or aggressively. It’s a form of digital puppeteering not too distant from the practices of modern call centers—and an alarmingly convincing vision of a future in which you never quite know whether it’s another human or a machine beyond your screen.80