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Amazon Is Closing the Marketplace Bezos Called 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence' — Because the Real Thing Showed Up · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the machine that was secretly a person finally gets replaced by a machine. CNBC reported Tuesday that Amazon is permanently closing Mechanical Turk on September thirtieth.
• 0:15
  [Guest] Twenty-one years old, and the notice gives no reason beyond a routine review.
• 0:21
  [Host] I filled out surveys on that thing in grad school for beer money. What was it, really?
• 0:28
  [Guest] A marketplace for work computers couldn't do. Label an image, transcribe a clip, for pennies apiece. Amazon's own documentation counts more than five hundred thousand workers.
• 0:40
  [Host] And Bezos had a name for it.
• 0:43
  [Guest] Artificial artificial intelligence. Named for an eighteenth-century chess automaton that beat European nobility with a man folded inside the cabinet.
• 0:52
  [Host] So the joke was always that the intelligence was people. Now the real thing arrives and the people are the line item.
• 1:02
  [Guest] A 2018 study of actual earnings on the platform found a median near two dollars an hour.
• 1:09
  [Host] Under minimum wage in every state. Is anyone really losing a living here?
• 1:15
  [Guest] Krista Pawloski would say yes. She started turking on maternity leave, went full time after she lost her job, to care for a son with special needs. She organizes now with the data-worker group Turkopticon, and told CNBC some still do it close to full time.
• 1:35
  [Host] So a model got cheaper and steadier than two dollars an hour. That's a threshold, and it got crossed at the bottom of the wage scale first.
• 1:47
  [Guest] Not only a model. Pawloski told CNBC the platform had been declining for years, Amazon putting fewer resources in as rivals showed up. Plenty of workers left for better platforms before any model could replace them.
• 2:03
  [Host] So this is Amazon losing a market, not machines winning one.
• 2:08
  [Guest] Both. Insurance and travel companies are scrambling to find somewhere else to send their tasks. The demand moved up-market, to firms buying expertise over volume.
• 2:19
  [Host] Up-market meaning what?
• 2:21
  [Guest] Mercor doesn't want a crowd. It wants credentials. Doctors, lawyers, PhDs, paid by the hour to argue with a model. Bloomberg reported in July it was in talks to raise at twenty billion dollars.
• 2:36
  [Host] The bottom of that market closes the same summer the top gets priced like that. So the threshold isn't one line. It moves up the wage scale.
• 2:48
  [Guest] Same work, split in two. The part that needed a warm body is gone. The part that needs a license is booming.
• 2:57
  [Host] Did anyone see it coming before Amazon did?
• 3:01
  [Guest] In 2023 researchers at EPFL in Lausanne reran a summarization task there and estimated up to forty-six percent of workers were quietly running it through a language model.
• 3:13
  [Host] So Bezos's artificial artificial intelligence had grown a third artificial.
• 3:18
  [Guest] The people closest to the work priced the change first, by cheating on it. Every shortcut went into the training data as a human answer.
• 3:29
  [Host] Fine, but who should be nervous today? I don't label images for pennies.
• 3:35
  [Guest] If your job is defined as doing what the software can't do yet, that definition is what's shrinking. It shrank first at the bottom of the wage scale, not at the hardest work.
• 3:49
  [Host] Meaning transcription, first-pass moderation.
• 3:51
  [Guest] Any queue that existed because the code wasn't ready. Amazon closed the biggest one and pointed its customers at people with diplomas.
• 4:01
  [Host] The threshold we keep circling has a name. Patrick Deglon calls it the Substitution Threshold in Unscarcity: the moment the cheapest reliable provider of a service stops being human. It crosses one job at a time.
• 4:17
  [Guest] The trick was always a man in a cabinet pretending to be a machine. Now the machine is real, and the man is out of a job. For more on the Labor Cliff and the hidden work behind automation, head to unscarcity dot ai — the book's on Amazon, the audiobook's on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.