In 1783, an autonomous machine beat Benjamin Franklin in a game of chess. Well, at least that’s what he was led to believe.
Franklin’s opponent was a life-size, humanlike figure seated at a large wooden cabinet, supposedly rigged with machinery that made it capable of playing a game of chess without human support. It was known as the Turk.
Over 230 years after the automaton played its match in Paris against the founding father, e-commerce giant Amazon cribbed the name for its own facsimile automation project, the Mechanical Turk (mTurk). It’s a website that crowdsources an on-demand workforce to complete tasks that humans still outperform computers at.
Workers, colloquially known as Turkers, pick up small projects, or HITs, requested by people and companies around the world. They earn pennies per minute to do things like transcribe audio files, flag images for a social media site, or take surveys.
But why ...
