"In 18th century Vienna, the Hungarian engineer and debutant Wolfgang von Kempelen shocked court patrons with a bizarre contraption: a great mechanical box which could seemingly play and even win chess games without any input from a human. Called the " Mechanical Turk," Kempelen's device became the talk of high society for decades, and went on to beat famed opponents including Ben Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte."
"It's a particularly impressive number, given Fireflies' CTO and co-founder Sam Udotong's recent admission that the company got its start in 2017 by "charging $100/month for an AI that was really just two guys." "The best way to validate your business idea is by becoming the product yourself," Udotong wrote in a LinkedIn post."
In 18th-century Vienna, Wolfgang von Kempelen presented the Mechanical Turk, a faux automaton that concealed a human chess master inside to simulate autonomous play. The device captivated and deceived high society by appearing to play and defeat elite opponents. That pattern of technological spectacle masking labor persists in modern industry, where systems branded as autonomous rely on low-paid or hidden human workers. Contemporary examples include retail checkout systems staffed by overseas labor and AI services that depend on ghost workers. Fireflies, a meeting-transcription startup, claimed wide corporate adoption while acknowledging early operations were manually executed by its founders impersonating an AI.
Read at Futurism
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