Episode Details
Back to Episodes
When "AI" Was Just Someone at a Desk
Episode 5398
Published 3 weeks, 3 days ago
Description
A comedy sketch about a "Waze call center" turns out to be less absurd than it looks. This episode traces fauxtomation — automation that isn't automation — from Amazon Go's thousand human reviewers to Facebook M, Expensify's SmartScan, Uber's safety drivers, and Taco Bell's drive-through AI. We dig into the economics that make the deception profitable, why the labor stays offshore and invisible, and what Amazon's own Mechanical Turk — "artificial artificial intelligence," named after a fake chess automaton — says about the whole game.
Episode #465974 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/465974