The Demise of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Is an Omen for Work in the AI Age

For more than two decades, Amazon.com Inc.’s Mechanical Turk offered a similar illusion to its namesake. The 18th century chess-playing “machine” was actually a contraption controlled by a human hidden in a box. Amazon’s groundbreaking digital work platform did this at scale. Its Mechanical Turk was an army of hidden, anonymous workers carrying out a dizzying array of small mundane tasks for money.