Ayhan Aytes

Bio

Ayhan Aytes is a media researcher studying cultural interfaces by means of media archaeology. His focus is on understanding pre-modern media such as maps, automata and clocks within their social, cultural
and political context. His photography and multimedia works were recently exhibited in a joint project in Istanbul, “Reading the City of Signs: Istanbul: Revealed or Mystified.” He holds a master’s degree in Communication Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago. Ayhan Aytes is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of California San Diego in the Department of Communication and is a research assistant in the University of California multi-campus research group, Transliteracies.

Abstract

Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and Cultural History of human/machine Assemblages

Amazon’s MTurk is a significant example of valorization of collective intelligence in the networked economy.  Mediated by this online platform, the workers of the “artificial artificial intelligence” system search, find and fulfill human intelligence tasks (HITs) requested by developers. This assemblage represents a crucial formation in the global scale as it facilitates the supply of the intellectual labor needs of the mainly US based businesses by workers from across the world. The particular conditions of the intellectual labor within this crowdsourcing scheme maintain a transient, task-based and limited-time relationship between the worker and the requester and do not require a direct communication between the parties. The system borrows 18th century inventor von Kempelen’s Chess Playing Automaton as the metaphor for the kind of relationship it establishes between intellectual labor and seemingly automated complex tasks since in both cases the performance of workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine. This relationship can be further scrutinized by approaching the concept of automata within the cultural history of human machine assemblage in the west. Since the introduction of Byzantine and Muslim clocks and automata during the medieval period and until the early modernity, European conception of oriental automata functioned as a composite alterity, which provided a peculiar interface for the investigation of the pre-modern ontological dichotomies as they were projected onto the outer margins of the European cultural universe. Within this western genealogy of machine animating specters,  the linkage between von Kempelen’s Chess Playing automaton and Amazon’s crowdsourcing enterprise appear to be more than a mere trade insight especially in the context of the process of disembodiment of information formulated through the postwar cybernetic discourse which has largely contributed to the current conceptualization of the cognitive labor.