Mechanical Turk's Third Act
Bi-weekly news commentary
Hey friend,
How are you? I hope you’re having a great day.
The gist:
With all the crazy rapid LLM developments you read about, what’s your current take on AI? To me, it feels like we’re currently going through a foggy mixed-signal transition period. See the full chain: In universities, AI policies encourage students to use AI responsibly, but the line has become quite blurry when assignments are fully AI-generated with minimal human judgement. Students then look for jobs, and companies are bombarded by AI-generated resumes and task AI to sift through them to fish for suitable applicants. Once in, employees are encouraged to use AI to become more productive; at the same time, they’re criticized for not putting their own human stamp or not validating the results enough, carrying serious legal implications. You see AI-driven massive job layoffs as AI can do much more faster, while trillion-dollar AI startup valuations. A recent FT article eloquently captures this blur by rewinding to the first Mechanical Turk. From its first act in the 1800s, as a machine that miraculously played chess, drawing crowds with an expert player hidden under it; to the second act: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the 2010s, where “Crowd Labor” did manual repetitive work like surveys and video transcription. And now entering its third act with the closing of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk last month, as AI can do all these low-level jobs, and people are transitioning to train LLMs to produce better results.
Find out what steps you can responsibly take today.