Episode Details

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.

Continue the story on unscarcity.ai:

• Autonomy Theater: The Humans Behind 'Autonomous' Robots
• The Substitution Threshold: When You Stop Being the Cheapest Option

Full episode notes on unscarcity.ai