Kings, queens and luminaries were fooled by this machine since they had seen amazing clockwork singing birds, and the wonders of technology so, when Wolfgang von Kempelen said that he'd made a clockwork chess playing "Turk*" since they didn't know how the cam-systems in the clockwork birds worked and couldn't be bothered to listen to the people who did they were fooled.
I'm so glad I live in a time when this could not happen.
*seems racist in some obscure way IDK even know...
@futurebird I need to reprint my first published story (from Asimov’s SF, 2008) on my website — been procrastinating on making an audio version. It is about a burger joint pretending to be staffed by robots, and one of the people who works there as a ‘robot’. 😬 It keeps…feeling relevant!
Yes! You should share it. It sounds good.
@futurebird AGI = a guy inside
@futurebird Did Waymo claim their cars didn't have human fallback? I ask because I don't remember that claim; having a human-staffed mission control is SOP for AV systems.
Waymo still claims they don't have human fallback. They prefer to call their remote humans "assistants" who give "information and suggestions" to failed robots. Have to dig into the footnotes to find out their remote humans can drive or "reposition" the robots.
bsky.app/profile/anic...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yn6bcohufshqvn2ctxnudvcp/post/3mdt6fzbeps2f
@futurebird the weird thing is there is hope in this. I’m disabled, long for the days we played someone to operate the elevator. I’m all for new complex systems that require a human to steer. We need the work. It maybe won’t work out this way in the end, but this is better than the alternative I guess.
@futurebird I had no idea what the name "mechanical Turk" referred to!
Kings, queens and luminaries were fooled by this machine since they had seen amazing clockwork singing birds, and the wonders of technology so, when Wolfgang von Kempelen said that he'd made a clockwork chess playing "Turk*" since they didn't know how the cam-systems in the clockwork birds worked and couldn't be bothered to listen to the people who did they were fooled.
I'm so glad I live in a time when this could not happen.
*seems racist in some obscure way IDK even know...
@futurebird @lffontenelle fun fact: In Yiddish, saying "he treated me in the Turkish manner" is often translated as "he double-crossed me". Except that's a sanitized translation. So this is just your basic fun orientalism here. In western thought, Turks do exotic, tricky things beyond white people's understanding. And that exoticism carries with it a risque, party time element. Woo hoo.
And here I am thinking "he treated me in the Turkish manner" meant he threw away my coffee then made new coffee for both of us muttering the whole time.
Since that is what normally what happens.
@futurebird@sauropods.win @lffontenelle@mastodon.social I fully believe that the human mind and body also work exactly like this, it’ll be revealed. Except in most cases on the fediverse, it’s a cat inside.
These are deep cuts of racism beyond my pay grade (or patience for racist nonsense.)
@futurebird @lffontenelle We also know about the massive enrichment of a few people at the expense of mass unemployment from the Industrial Revolution/Luddite movement. Brian Merchant's 2023 #book draws these parallels in "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech".
“Mechanical Turk” is one of those terms that I wish more people knew and understood.
Arguably the sham of the Turk is part of the reason early CS people were so excited to make a computer play chess "for real."
But the watchmakers of that time would have *understood* just how laughable this was. And presumably some kept quiet but not all of them.
No one listened. For 84 years.
@CptSuperlative @futurebird
The podcast Hoax! did an episode on it recently and went into a lot of detail. A lot of people knew the mechanical Turk must be fake, but for a long time (even after the inventor died) no one could tell for sure how the magic trick worked.
Lazy foppish "players" who can't be bothered to understand why all the clock-makers keep using the word "deterministic" whatever that means and saying it's not possible that this thing was really clockwork. They must just be envious.
It's a hit at parties. Hired that wolfgang guy again.
This charade went on for 84 years!
@futurebird "AI" = "actually Indians"
@futurebird
Isn't that defrauding their investors?
Like the whole Theranos thing? "We have an amazing machine that does [...]" but in fact it doesn't?
@futurebird
Doesn't that make them ... honest? Honest scammers, granted, but honest.
It's like the "other guys are stealing and lying to you. I'm only lying to you." kind of honesty.
@futurebird One of the taglines when Mechanical Turk launched—“Artificial artificial intelligence”—I always found so clever, too. Hey, if your software can automate only 95% of a task, we’ll source a tiny bit of human judgment to fill the gap. They economics of it ended up being somewhat less clever, however.
@futurebird I see a silver lining. It's a pretty tacit admission that humans are still required to perform jobs at a certain degree of competence. Also it's remote work. *yay*
@futurebird who could have seen that coming? 😜
Turns out Bezos is the supervillain that has to reveal his dastardly plans.
musk had some party with robots and the robots were being control
....wait for it
by people behind a curtain
*head desk*
A nearby "experimental " Whole Foods had cameras overhead every aisle, and check out – free walk out of the store checkout. The experiment ended, no doubt because the "verifiers "in Southeast Asia --you didn't get your transaction record until an hour or so after you left the store-- were not cost-effective in getting rid of the clerks in the United States🍸😾
@futurebird @gleick @martinicat There is almost obsessive effort to try to outsources as much as possible. The only reason this even makes any sense is to do Arbitrage on labor which is also Mobility restricted due to the immigration policies these same people openly support. It's leaving the lower class in Davila countries in a bind where they are cost of living is too high to accept low-income country wages but their income isn't high enough to afford to be the upper class in a sort of geographically hyper stratified global economy where different classes of workers live on entirely different continents
@futurebird @gleick @martinicat it's almost like they're trying to replace immigrant labor with no rights with outsourced telecommuting robot labor and they're willing to pay not only cost of the robotics but also the deportation cost to kidnap workers from minneapolis, send them to mexico, and then employ them at a lower wage to drive a super expensive robot in Minneapolis or some shit like that. That's the only coherent economic rationale but even then it seems insane.
@futurebird
More & more it’s seeming like ‘AI’ is basically an abstraction-layer insulting companies from labour exploitation and accountabaility. 🤔
The representative from Remote was, anxious to get them into a cab and to the hotel.
"We apologize for the software issue."
RemoteMaid said the property damage was due to "a bad software update." Paul could not shake the feeling that it looked like the work of a person.
Every toy in the nursery smashed, all food in the pantry crushed, clothes shredded. The scissors still rested on the dresser.
But, then he was being hurried away, as if they didn't want him to look too closely. #soon
@futurebird got a link to the article you're quoting? Curious to read it…
I'm riffing on fiction which is a bad habit I have. Just trying to imagine where this will all lead. Apologies for not making that clear.
@futurebird Oh, sorry! That completely flew over my head (I know there are some harebrained humanoid "assistant" robots being demoed out there, which are indeed hilariously bad mechanical turk setups, and it didn't feel like a big jump that there'd already be some beta users of such a service 😅 )
AI: Absent Indians
@futurebird
I always thought it was odd a company named for a dwindling rainforest called its products 'kindle' and 'fire' and now they feel very torment nexus on the nose.
It really is a kind of fraud, yes. One wonders how long shareholders will keep falling for this kind of trickery.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk was, at least, open about it being humans doing the work
not that it makes it right or anything
