The Mechanical Turk’s hidden human operator concealed an apparent automation

Evidence

It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 343

Categorization

• SHARE: The Ottoman-Turk costume and mirror-table deception of the 18th-century chess automaton would delight anyone into history of technology or hoaxes.
• CANDY: A genuinely fun, self-contained oddity: a famous ‘chess machine’ was secretly a hidden human dwarf.
• XREF: connects to: Amazon Mechanical Turk operates as an updated Marxian piece-wage sweatshop — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 325; Automation requires active human work to organize the relinquishing of subjectivity — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 650; AI tools require hidden labor for data management and content screening. — Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, The AI Con- How to Fight Big Tech’s…, 173 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Automation requires active human work to organize the relinquishing of subjectivity #exemplifies (0.72) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 650
• AI tools require hidden labor for data management and content screening. #exemplifies (0.72) — Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, The AI Con- How to Fight Big Tech’s…, 173
• Microtask workers train the AI systems that will replace them #exemplifies (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 217
• Amazon Mechanical Turk operates as an updated Marxian piece-wage sweatshop #expands (0.70) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 325