Mechanical Turk is shutting down. Amazon launched it in 2005 so computers could outsource their failures to humans. Bezos called it "artificial artificial intelligence." That's what passes for wit when you're bald and own the Washington Post.
The service let companies pay people pennies to do tasks computers couldn't handle. Captcha solving. Image tagging. Data entry that machine learning kept f*cking up. For two decades, humans pretended to be algorithms while algorithms pretended to be competent. Everyone made money except the humans doing the actual work.
Retail traders loved this model. They thought they were disrupting labor markets by earning three dollars an hour identifying traffic lights in photos. The gig economy in its purest form. No benefits. No job security. Just you and a computer that couldn't tell a stop sign from a mailbox, so it hired you to fix its incompetence for less than minimum wage.
Now AI can finally do what Mechanical Turk workers were doing. The robots learned. They don't need humans anymore. They can tag their own images and solve their own captchas. Progress looks like replacing low-wage contractors with software that works for free.
Bezos moved on years ago. He's building rocket ships and dating women who look like they were designed by the same AI that killed Mechanical Turk. Amazon kept the service running because shutting things down requires admitting they're dead. Corporate inertia is cheaper than a funeral.
The people who made rent money on Mechanical Turk will find other ways to get exploited. DoorDash needs drivers. Fiverr needs graphic designers willing to work for exposure. The market always provides another opportunity to debase yourself for fractional income.
Twenty years of humans doing computer work so computers could learn to do human work. Amazon's greatest trick was convincing people that being a worse version of software was a job.
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