The mechanical Turk: a short history of ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ (original) (raw)
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Selected Papers in Internet Research 2021. Research from the Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers., 2021
In this research, we analyzed the relationship between women and Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) – a platform where people work remotely performing Human Intelligent Tasks. HITs are small and important tasks responsible for making Artificial Intelligence feasible, such as labeling data. In this paper we discuss how AI automation is, in fact, an opaque architecture (Pasquinelli and Joler 2020) that perpetuates gender issues in digital work.
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Discourses of robotic replacement and of the end of work have survived to the present day. But more and more voices now challenge the very idea that technological innovation is necessarily conducive to job loss. According to several studies, new high-tech jobs is accompanied by an even bigger low-tech job creation, and AI can be expected to be no exception. Based on new evidence about the role of human-annotated data in machine learning and algorithmic solutions, a new generation of scholars are now studying the germane phenomena of “heteromation”, “automation last mile” or, more simply, platform-based digital labor needed to generate, train, verify, and sometimes modify in real-time huge quantities of examples that machines are supposed to learn from. Digital labor designates datified and taskified human activities. The first type of platform occupation ison-demand labor. The second type of platform-based digital labor ismicrowork. Finally, the third type of digital labor issocial ...
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In this proposal, we pursue an approximation to Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) women workers to understand their specificities and their layers of dependence in this environment so pertinent to the “late capitalism” (Crary 2016). AMT is an online platform where workers perform low-paid services that cannot be efficiently automated. Since 2019, in the Group [Anonymized excerpt], at the University [Anonymized excerpt], we have carried out projects where we approach these workers in an attempt to understand their routines, desires and the future of work itself. In our experiences, it has become evident that women turkers tend to be even more precarious due to gender issues passed to AMT. Also we concluded that AMT help keeping the women labor power available for unpaid domestic services and, at the same time, make it profitable for several companies. To understand more about them, we conducted a survey with 53 women turkers and systematized their responses. We approached some of them to ...
Beyond Mechanical Turk: The Work of Brazilians on Global AI Platforms
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The aim of this chapter is to analyse the micro-work of Brazilians on global artificial intelligence platforms. In context of platformisation of labour, we show that artificial intelligence still requires a lot of human work, leading to global value chains and a global gig economy. In a digital economy, there are inequalities involving local workers and global platforms. At present, however, most research on micro-work focuses on the Global North. Latin America remains a blindspot. This research investigates the micro-work of Brazilians on two specific platforms, Appen and Lionbridge. This research reveal that micro-work is closely intertwined with the historical informality of labour in the country, a gig economy that existed prior to digital labor itself. There is no ‘digital labour universalism’. Rather, there is an AI colonialism reinforcing North–South inequalities from a platform labour perspective.
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Democracy is all about transparency, visibility, and public engagement. In the Greek polis, political decisions were discussed in the agora, a public place where all citizens (in that case only free men older than 30) could listen and engage. Rep- resentational democracy today is less public, but transparency of decision pro- cesses is of the utmost importance. If a government cannot make its decisions transparent enough, it runs the risk of losing the people’s trust. Transparency in a political sense implies rules, visibility, and the readiness to argue and give rea- sons. With the emergence of AI applications not only in the political sphere but in basically every aspect of social and private life, we are faced with new forms of opacity and nonconscious cognition, which strongly impact human decision making, behavior, movement, and communication. The central problem is that AI applications act without being able to give an account of the underlying reasons and even the underlying causal processes remain opaque (black box). If an AI used for analyzing credit rating denies credit, this decision can ruin a private life. If then reasons are not given or possibilities explained, this alone might shake peo- ple’s trust in civil society. Agency based in nonconscious cognition is becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon and thus calls for ethical and phenomenological reflec- tion. In this essay, I aim at understanding the way in which AI is experienced in terms of visibility and transparency. Toward this end I will combine phenomeno- logical considerations with Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the nature of tech- nology.
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Artificial intelligence is being touted as a new wave of machinic processing and productive potential. Building on concepts starting with the invention of the term artificial intelligence in the 1950s, now, machines can supposedly not only see, hear, and think, but also solve problems and learn, and in this way, it seems that actually there is a new form of humiliation for humans. This article starts with a historical overview of the forerunners of artificial intelligence, where ideas of how intelligence can be formulated according to philosophers and social theorists begin to enter the work sphere and are inextricably linked to capitalist production. However, there always already has been an artificial intelligence in power in, on the one hand, technical machines and the social machine money, and on the other, humans, making both sides (machines and humans), an interface of their mutual capitalist socialisation. The question this piece addresses is, then, what kind of capitalist socialisation will the actual forms of artificial intelligence bring?
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Shepherd's Office (SO) is a collaborative performance and research project between artists Daniela Vainio and Zaneta Zukalova, first introduced at Tate Modern (Tate Exchange) London in 2017, which questions the systematic order of Amazon Mechanical Turk. In May 2019, SO held a live investigative performance at the Art Fair Suomi in Helsinki, with an aim to collect the data that informs this article; SO's focus was on the socio-political background of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers and their personal relations to and opinions on the platform. The present article introduces both the artistic and investigative aspects of the project and the problematics of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and offers an insight into the research inputs, processes, and outcomes.
Ethics and Social Welfare, 2018
The potential societal impacts of automation using intelligent control and communications technologies have emerged as topics in a number of recent writings and public policy initiatives. Constructed entities labelled as ‘thinking machines’ (such as IBM’s Watson as well as intelligent chatbot and robotic systems) have also played significant roles in this discourse. This paper provides an historical sequencing then analyses a selection of writings produced since the 1940s concerning the economic and social issues involving artificial intelligence (AI) research and applications. The paper explores how overstatements and hyperbolic themes and concepts, often stemming from AI’s early periods (including from Herbert Simon), are being employed in characterisations of current AI approaches in apparently-opportunistic attempts to provide rhetorical support for various large-scale business and societal initiatives. It also addresses the relative neglect of consideration of many of AI’s sociotechnical failures and discontinued approaches in recent examinations of automation and social welfare issues. The paper discusses the moral logic of AI researchers and developers providing reasonable and measured narratives in public discourse rather than hyperbole, efforts that can empower decision makers to make sounder judgments concerning the technology’s current and future applications as well as allocate the rewards of the technology more equitably.