AI Insights in History: The Mechanical Turk

No, we’re not talking about the Amazon service. (Andres from the future here, this is a lie).

As we continue into the future with LLMs and generative AI tools in hand, I have been constantly reminded of the various attempts at ‘AI’ in the history of humanity. Today, we’ll be exploring the story of a chess playing robot that turned out to be an illusion, as well as extracting some key insights that technologists can take with them even 200 years later.

Let’s dive in!

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A Brief Visit to 1770

The Mechanical Turk is one of the earliest instances of attempts for an ‘autonomous’ chess robot and artificial intelligence. Created by Wolfram von Kappen in 1770, it was a spectacle and a genuine powerhouse against numerous famous people who also played chess like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

The best part of the whole thing was that it was all fake. There was someone in the actual compartment playing the game using complex mechanisms to make the bot move. There were secret compartments, mirrors, and in general just a myriad of methods to keep up the illusion for onlookers. Eventually, the Mechanical Turk was proved to be fake. It did make journeys all over the world, to places like Moscow, Paris, Dresden, and Cuba.

So who was the Mechanical Turk? Nobody knows! The original player was unknown. Later, when the Mechanical Turk was given to other people in the 1800’s, there was a handful of masters that rotated between. Several of the best chess players of the time casually sat in such a small little compartment. At some point, a replica of the bot was even hooked up to a chess playing computer program in 1989. It eventually made it to ‘autonomy’ in the way it was intended in 1770, but over 200 years after the fact.

Key Insights

History is one of the best opportunities to learn about how we can navigate the future. I’ve summarized some of the key points I’d like to highlight about the story about the Mechanical Turk and how I find it insightful:

Human Ingenuity is Always Important

In regards to the Mechanical Turk, the magic of the illusion wasn’t necessarily the machine or the complex mechanisms. It was the person within the box. Later, it was the congregation of master chess players that made the illusion believable.

Humans, and the beautiful minds they carry, are the magic that we constantly need to recognize and venerate. Anything less in this new wave of generative AI is doing fellow humans a disservice.

Beware the Illusion of Automation

The original Mechanical Turk (as well as the modern examples propped up by Amazon) relies upon the belief from the consumer / audience that whatever the Mechanical Turk is doing is fully automated. In our current day and age, 25% of Gen Z believe that AI is already sentient, and I believe other generations are in a similar boat.

Who does this illusion benefit? The consumer? Or the company that’s advocating for you to continue using their tool for everything you do? I always advocate for users of AI to take a step back and use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. in a way that benefits YOU, not the company giving you the tool.

Will AI move as quickly as we think?

It took over 200 years for the Mechanical Turk (or a similar contraption) to be connected and used with an automated system for chess playing. Innovation, however exciting it is, can take time to actually come to fruition. Despite claims from companies like OpenAI about artificial general intelligence (AGI) being on the horizon, we’re still utilizing sycophantic statistical models (i.e. LLMs) for emails. We likely will continue to be using them for a while.

Conveniently, the goal posts also continue to suddenly move when that goal is about to be missed. Although the modern generative AI tools are an entirely different beast to a chess playing automaton, it is likely that AGI will take a lot longer than any AI company is claiming.

Transparency with AI is Key

There are countless instances where the transparency behind the use of tools ranging from “mechanical turk”-like services and generative AI is a major concern and detractor of credibility:

• People are concerned about an experiment ran on reddit users on r/changemymind that tested AI’s persuasiveness online.

• An Australian radio station used an AI radio host for over six months without disclosing to their listeners.

• Hundreds of instances of scholarly articles have been caught using AI tools without disclosing it, leaving artifacts and common error messages throughout their papers.

• Amazon got caught using real people in their AI ‘cashier-less shop’ for over 70% of the tasks.

• Pete Buttigieg, although critical of the ‘gig economy’ and how it exploits people, used his own hires from the Amazon ‘Mechanical Turk’ service during 2020 for as low as 1 cent per task.

I fundamentally believe the issue is less the use of the tool, and the lack of disclosure that the tool is being used. Consumers and your audience deserve to know when AI is being used, and how their data plays into that.

So where do we head from here?

The Mechanical Turk is a wonderful example of how illusions and fake ‘artificial intelligence’ can still be inspiring and enlightening to modern technologists. To me, it reminds us to celebrate humans behind the panel, to be mindful of the illusions presented to us, and to demand for the transparency we deserve for how AI is being used.

-Andres @ Red Mage

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