Amazon Is Closing the Marketplace Bezos Called 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence' — Because the Real Thing Showed Up
About This Episode
Amazon posted a banner on the Mechanical Turk homepage saying the 21-year-old micro-task marketplace will permanently close on September 30, 2026. Launched in 2005 to farm out work computers could not do — labeling images, transcribing audio, filling out surveys — MTurk grew to more than 500,000 workers paid pennies a task. It is closing as AI absorbs the low end of that work and the money moves to credentialed expert annotators.
Our Take
The first labor market AI has closed outright is the one built to impersonate AI — and it closed from the bottom, where the work paid pennies, while the money moved up to credentialed experts.
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Autonomy Theater: The Humans Behind 'Autonomous' Robots
Mechanical Turk is the founding institution of the pattern this article describes — a machine sold as automated with people hidden inside it — and its closure is the moment the hidden people stop being needed.
The Substitution Threshold: When You Stop Being the Cheapest Option
The article defines the moment the cheapest reliable provider of a service is no longer human; MTurk's shutdown is that threshold being crossed at the very bottom of the wage scale first.