What's this about?
Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced human-task marketplace running since 2005, is closing on 30 September.
What exactly was Mechanical Turk?
A marketplace for tasks too small or too fuzzy for software: label this image, transcribe this clip, judge whether these two products are the same. It was named after an 18th-century chess-playing "automaton" that concealed a human inside — a joke about work that looks automated but is not. It also supplied a large share of academic behavioural-science participants and much of the early labelled data that machine learning was built on.
What's the community saying?
The thread reads as an obituary with an obvious irony: a platform built to route work that machines could not do, closing because machines now do most of it. There is a secondary strand about the research community losing a standard participant pool, and about the working conditions and pay that made it controversial throughout its life.