Back in the mid-18th century, Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen amazed audiences with what appeared to be a chess-playing automaton. Called the Mechanical Turk, it consisted of a wooden box with whirring gears and a mannequin dressed like a Turk, whose hand deftly moved pieces across the board, beating most of its human opponents.
Of course, the Turk was really controlled by a human being—a chess master, in fact—hidden within the box along with a second chessboard linked to the first with magnets. The Mechanical Turk was just an ingenious hoax, one that fooled many gullible souls.
I find it surprising, and rather creepy, that over two hundred years later some of our most advanced computers have resorted to employing human beings in almost the same way. A cheekily named Web services platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, gives computers the ability to dole out their menial tasks to Internet ...
