AI and the new Mechanical Turk
The evolution of the technology offers fresh opportunities for hoodwinkers and charlatans.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
The era of humans pretending to be machines is over. The era of machines pretending to be humans has begun.
ST PHOTO: KUA CHEE SIONG
Sarah O'Connor
For about 85 years spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a strange automaton called the Mechanical Turk toured across Europe and America, drawing entranced crowds wherever it went. The machine appeared to be able to play chess all on its own, though its secret was disappointingly mundane: There was a small human chess player hiding inside.
Why were so many people taken in? According to Charles Michael Carroll, author of a book on the famous automaton, this was an era in which the “mechanical magic of the industrial revolution was a topic of day-to-day marvelling”. All sorts of new machines were being invented that were capable of previously unthinkable things. So why not play chess? In other words, the disorientating pace of technological change had created an “opportunity for some mystification and much charlatanism”.
