Mechanical Turk
In plain wordsA famous fake chess-playing machine from 1770: a robed figure that seemed to play chess by itself but hid a human player inside. Its name now stands for 'AI' that is really people working behind the scenes.
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History
An apparent chess-playing automaton built by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Habsburg court in Vienna and unveiled in 1770: a life-size figure in Ottoman costume, seated behind a cabinet, that took on human challengers and seemed to play strong chess. The games were really run by a skilled player hidden in the cabinet, who tracked the pieces through magnets beneath the board and worked the figure's arm with levers, while the exhibitor's show of clockwork drew attention away from him. Toured on and off through Europe and the Americas for over eighty years, it is said to have faced Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, and it fed early arguments over whether a machine could reason; Edgar Allan Poe's 1836 essay 'Maelzel's Chess-Player' argued that it had to be a hoax. A fire in Philadelphia destroyed it in 1854.
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Figurativefigurative
By extension, a system presented as automated or AI-driven whose work is secretly or largely done by people; when done openly in research, the technique is called Wizard-of-Oz prototyping. Amazon named its 2005 crowdsourcing marketplace, Amazon Mechanical TurkAmazon Mechanical Turk, prop. n.: A website Amazon opened in 2005 that acts as a hiring hall for tiny online jobs, such as labeling images for AI, which registered workers pick up and finish for a few cents each., after the automaton, describing the human workers it supplies as 'artificial artificial intelligence'.
The AI receptionist turned out to be a mechanical turk: a call center reading from a script.
Origin
Kempelen built it in 1769–1770 to impress Empress Maria Theresa; after his death it was bought and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. 'Turk' reflects the figure's costume, a product of eighteenth-century European fascination with the Ottoman world.
Usage note
The story prefigures modern debates about hidden human labor behind AI, such as data annotation and remote operation of robots marketed as autonomous; see also AI washingAI washing, n.: Falsely claiming that a product or company uses AI, or exaggerating how much it does, to look more advanced and attract customers or investors..
Related
- Amazon Mechanical TurkAmazon Mechanical Turk, prop. n.: A website Amazon opened in 2005 that acts as a hiring hall for tiny online jobs, such as labeling images for AI, which registered workers pick up and finish for a few cents each.
- AI washingAI washing, n.: Falsely claiming that a product or company uses AI, or exaggerating how much it does, to look more advanced and attract customers or investors.
- crowdsourcingcrowdsourcing, n.: Getting many people over the internet to each do a small piece of a big job, such as labeling pictures for a few cents apiece, with anyone free to join in.
- Deep BlueDeep Blue, prop. n.: IBM's chess computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the first time a machine defeated a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.