A crowdsourcing platform is shutting down. Crowdsourcing, in plain terms, means routing work to a large pool of people rather than processing it through an automated system. Amazon's Mechanical Turk ran on that model from 2005 onward. Jeff Bezos once called the service "artificial artificial intelligence," and the label was an honest one.
What the name actually described
The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th-century chess machine that appeared to operate entirely on its own. It did not. A human sat concealed inside, making every move. Amazon named its service after that machine, and the parallel held. From the outside, Mechanical Turk delivered results that looked like software output. The work was human.
Bezos used the "artificial artificial intelligence" label because the platform was not doing what AI implies. Artificial intelligence, broadly, means machines completing work that otherwise requires human thinking. Mechanical Turk worked the other way: the tasks on the platform were ones that people handled quickly and reliably but that computers, as of 2005, could not.
Amazon built a marketplace around that gap. Tasks easy for humans but too challenging for computers could be sent out to workers and completed one at a time. The service launched in 2005.
Now Amazon is closing it.