Editors’ Choice: Mechanical Turks and Mirror Stages
I like this essay by John Jones about search algorithms, which he compares to “mechanical Turk” automatons of the 18th Century.
It’s a point that’s well-understood in some circles and completely not in others. Witness the degree to which users continue to express some preference for couching search queries to Google and Siri in the form of natural-language questions: according to Bo Pang and Ravi Kumar, that tendency seems to be steadily increasing as users become more familiar with the functioning of search engines rather than decreasing. Users sometimes relate to Google as if it were an oracle, a non-human being with its own personality and knowledge.