It’s incredibly cathartic to see tech giants like Elon Musk or Amazon fall on their faces, have the curtain pulled back on their systems to reveal fraud and mock their inability to live up to their ever increasing hype. But such revelations have done little to affect their material power. The fact that cons much like the Mechanical Turk continue to pop up throughout history points not to the Mechanical Turk as an aberration, but as a developmental stage of technology, a moment where the capability of the technology matters less than its perceived image; it has become socially ingrained. We have all been tricked into becoming the worker inside the machine, performing actions in a prescriptive pipeline that trained these systems of precarity while we slowly relinquished control.
Technology that enters the public consciousness as a faux approximation of its stated capabilities nevertheless represents a manifestation of the desires its inventors/investors hold for the future. They are windows into the imaginations of executives. The present hype surrounding artificial intelligence seems to be beckoning towards a future of AI agents, of prompts, a future where everyone is a middle manager, instructing groups of workers to perform tasks while creating nothing themselves. It is a lazy imagination of creativity from a failed artist who resents the paycheck they receive from a job they hate. Someone who wants so desperately to be skilled at a game yet resents practice.