User:Lidia.Pereira/Trimesters/RWRM/MT

Return of the Crowds

Fragmentation is a crucial aspect of crowdsourcing platforms, preventing the access of the cognitive worker to the final intelectual work. These work relationships are task-based and ephemeral, not allowing for any connection between the parties involved and further removing the worker from the products of his/her labor.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a system in which workers around the world browse HIT's (Human Intelligence Tasks) and choose which ones to complete. These tasks can be set both by individual or corporate contractors. It is the neoliberal reincarnation of the dream behind the automatization of human tasks (chess-playing automaton), setting the coordinates of a cognitive capitalist relationship between task-based, fragmented cognitive labor under low-wages and automatized control and computing structures. Its workforce can be defined as Artificial Artificial Intelligence, and these work relations appear there were the legislation allows for gray areas - the digital networks - creating a system of exception where a private contractor relies on somebody else's basic needs to get their work done for little compensation. This labor performance is an instrumental element for the functioning of the disciplinary structure connected to this particular socioeconomic apparatus, training the human mind for industrial production through division of cognitive work.

Kempelen's chess-player authomaton (1770) is constituted by a Turk mannequin, whose mechanical mind is controlled by a hidden assistant. This automata is used by Foucault as a model for human body and social power in a double register:

1. Cartesian mind/body duality
2. State-disciplined body operations

The cultural and anthropological context of the Enlightement is crucial in understanding the choice of the Turk as an interface, and is set upon two main assumptions:

- The Turks's liminal quality, quieting the distrust provoked by the heretic associations of a body without a soul and conveying surveillance and discipline by representing the Other and setting, therefore, the limits of normality.
- The Turk's perceived docility, connected with the assumption that Muslims follow the code strictly. A docile and disciplined body is a productive body. On a deeper reading, we can speak of the intellectual labor performed by the hidden assistant on behalf of the automata.
Both liminality and docility are instrumental in understanding the model of power behind the social order in a context of mechanization of labor in Europe. The Turk represents the role of this model of power through multiple layers, being one of them the association of knowledge with power and status, that is, the knowledge of the secret behind this mechanism was only shared by the "guardians of knowledge and power", thus setting the difference between them and the general public. The borders between machines and living creatures slowly started to dissolve, considering the former as the latter and vice versa, exploring the now open ontological liminalities.

"Can the mind work without a body?", Kempelen's machine asks. Not yet, because it is still controlled by an assistent and yes, as it was proved by later technological improvements. The mechanical Turk conveyed the sense of a self-regulating system, as opposed to clockwork, the idea of which largely influenced the Enlightement ideas of liberal subjects and democracy, where every subject would rationally self-regulate his conduct according to their economic aspirations. One of the conflict free social systems behind this idea was formulated by Leibniz, who proposed a universal language based on the calculation of the predetermined laws which operate the spiritual automata that is our mind (calculus raciocinator). Chess helps us understand the functioning within a symbolic system, thus providing the connection to computer languages, operating under certain rules and limitations. In this case, Chess is stated by Deleuze to be a game of state, its pieces and their relations with each other coded according to a specific socioeconomic structure, representing the ideals of Enlightenment: subjects and actions coded by society's power structure. The chess playing Turk thus combined the self-regulating liberal subject and the docility of the oriental within the coded socioeconomic universe of chess. Charles Babbage considered the division of mental labor would eventually transfer the human cognitive tasks to a machine. This, of course, would shake the foundations of the "irreplaceability" of intellectual labor, representing a decline in its exchange value. The industrial capitalist mindset would consider it possible for anyone in a given regulated industrial organization to play any part, meaning everybody's replaceable. This appropriation of human thinking by computational organizations and apparatuses, such as the state, illustrates well the tendency of the encoding of human thought into numerical representations brought about by Enlightenment ideals.