The Algorithm Is Us

The latest Silicon Valley innovations are just people in computers’ clothing.

The empress had an interest in the cutting edge of scientific discovery and was curious to know what Kempelen thought of the conjurers who appeared in her court. These men used a base of rudimentary chemistry and physics to perform “natural magic.” Maria Theresa wanted to know: What did Kempelen think of their performances?

He thought he could do better.

Sixth months later, in the spring of 1770, Kempelen wheeled in a machine that would dazzle and confound audiences for the next century. Even after Kempelen’s death, his apparatus would travel across Europe and eventually tour the yet-to-be-conceived United States of America. It would give private demonstrations to Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe. And it would take 87 years for the public to learn exactly how the device truly worked.

A natural showman, Kempelen opened the doors to reveal a mass of gears and mechanisms. He pulled out the drawers to reveal more of the same. When he held a candle behind the cabinet, it shined through the mesh backing to show that there were no hidden compartments. Then he closed everything back up and invited one of Maria Theresa’s counts to play against the Turk.

Kempelen wound the machine using a crank behind the cabinet, then stepped away. The Turk’s head moved slightly, looking straight ahead at its opponent, then down at the chess board. Then its arm lifted from the cushion, hovered over a pawn, and eventually its wooden fingers clamped down around the tiny figurine. The Turk moved the piece ahead, its fingers released, and then it waited for the count to proceed.

Maria Theresa and the others had seen automata like this before. Even in the middle ages, clockmakers had developed elaborate statues that moved on the hour. Since then, their creations had grown more sophisticated. Earlier in the eighteenth-century, a Swiss clockmaker used a rotating spindle to essentially program the movements of an automata that could write, draw, and play the harp. Thirty-five years before Kempelen’s creation, a French inventor built an automata of a young man that could play the flute. The artificial boy had lungs made of bellows that would pump air through its windpipe and out its mouth. So as Kempelen’s Turk moved chess pieces around the board, Maria Theresa’s court was impressed, but not entirely surprised.

The shock came when the Turk won.

Kempelen’s demonstration was an instant success. Though he tried to distance himself from the machine afterwards and move onto other projects, Kempelen’s fame left him no choice but to continue showing the machine in other European courts. The Turk was disassembled and rebuilt many times, and passed to other owners for the next several decades. Audiences had seen automata programmed to carry out a circuit of playing music or writing, but no one had witnessed a machine that appeared to think like the Turk. Was this the next step—or, rather, a giant leap—in engineering capabilities?

But Kempelen’s Turk did not use any kind of programming or automation. His creation was no less ingenious, but it was built upon deception. The Turk’s doors and drawer were arranged to conceal a person hidden inside. Like a magician sawing a woman in half, Kempelen’s showmanship distracted the audience while someone else sat up within the cabinet. This chess master used a precise lever to control the Turk’s arm. When the opponent moved, small magnets would wiggle underneath the board, which the hidden player watched and tracked on a chess board of his own, lit by a candle, with the smoke rising out from behind the Turk’s turban, masked by the incense burning in its pipe.

The cutting edge of mechanization and engineering was nothing more than a person hiding inside a tiny, smoke-filled compartment. We would eventually build robots that could move pieces on a board and computers that could triumph over chess experts. But our belief in the ultimate power of machines obscured the contributions of real people along the way.

We know the name of the man who built the Turk. We don’t know the chess master hidden within the cabinet.

We understand how our news feeds are curated, how our faces are picked out of photos, how self-driving cars navigate the roads. It’s artificial intelligence. It’s an algorithm. The solution to any tech problem is always a more sophisticated algorithm.

Except that’s not really the case. It turns out that Calvin’s dad, Shel Silverstein, and Wolfgang von Kempelen understood a fundamental truth about technology better than anyone.

They knew that humans would always do the dirty work.

Software can block some offensive words or links, but only in specific instances that can too easily be circumvented by determined users (see “pr0n”). When deciding how explicit content is, common sense and context matters—language used in hate speech, for example, could also be found in a credible news story—and for that task there are still no substitutes for real people.

These employees work at long tables of computer banks, hidden within nondescript offices in towns like Bacoor, a half-hour outside of Manila. All day long they sit and stare at the worst things posted on the internet, confirming that yes, in fact, this is inappropriate. Vile. Disturbing. Videos of beheadings from terrorist organizations. Racist rants. Sexual exploitation of minors.

What about those algorithms? Surely there is an automated response to the content moderation problem. Unfortunately, persistent users can still circumvent these filters, and in some cases the algorithms have made the problem even worse. Last year, a Medium article brought attention to the deluge of strange, creepy, and sometimes graphically violent children’s content on YouTube. These videos featured disembodied floating heads, Disney characters mutilated in escalators, animated children put in dryers, lots of crying, insane uses of English, and adults with pacifiers.

But the problem was only brought to YouTube’s attention by vigilant journalists and concerned users. The algorithms fanned the flames instead of stamping them out. There is simply no substitute for human supervision.

Leaving those pulling cash from the ATM, and those toiling away behind it.

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