Amazon's Mechanical Turk

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Amazon created a web-based platform where people who had some job they needed to be done that couldn't be easily automated. They called it Mechanical Turk, which is something I'd heard of but didn't know about. Back many hundred years ago there was an AI hoax where somebody had built this chess plane machine and the puppet was dressed as a Turks or Ottomans.

Computer Scientist and author Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University and the Santa Fe Institute talks about her book Artificial Intelligence with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Mitchell explains where we are today in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and where we might be going. Despite the hype and excitement surrounding AI, Mitchell argues that much of what is called "learning" and "intelligence" when done by machines is not analogous to human capabilities. The capabilities of machines are highly limited to explicit, narrow tasks with little transfer to similar but different challenges. Along the way, Mitchell explains some of the techniques used in AI and how progress has been made in many areas.