2026-08-26 / Signal #1
Amazon is unplugging Mechanical Turk, the 21-year human marketplace that trained the AIs
“Bezos hid a human inside a chess machine and called it AI. Twenty-one years later, the human is the part they’re deleting.”
The Story
Amazon said it will close Mechanical Turk on 30 September 2026, ending the 2005 marketplace Jeff Bezos once branded “artificial artificial intelligence.” At its peak more than 500,000 people did penny tasks — labeling, transcription, surveys — that computers could not do. Last month Amazon already froze new customers; a 2023 study found up to 46% of remaining Turkers were using AI to complete the “human” work.
Why It Matters
The last official human-in-the-loop factory is being shut by the company that sold it as fake AI. The people who labeled the world out of a job are being replaced by the models they helped birth. That is work, money, identity, and a punchline with a corpse.
Evidence
CNBC; Quartz; Louise Matsakis on X; Amazon’s own MTurk notice.
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-08-26