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Amazon’s ‘AI-powered’ cashier-free shops use a lot of … humans.

This is how these bosses get rich: by hiding underpaid, unrecognised human work behind the trappings of technology, says the writer and artist James Bridle

It goes back at least to 1770, and the original “Mechanical Turk”, a chess-playing robot that wowed the courts of Europe for decades until being revealed that it was, in fact, a series of grandmasters hiding in a box. Recent updates include Facebook’s “smart assistant”, M, which claimed to be AI but referred any complex queries to people; and Cruise, the self-driving car company whose operations required remote workers to intervene every two-and-a-half to five miles. It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it.

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