SMC member Mary L. Gray (Microsoft Research, New England; Berkman Kein Center for Internet and Society) and colleague Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research, New York) have published an article for the Harvard Business Review asking, “just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence?”

Whether it is Facebook’s trending topics; Amazon’s delivery of Prime orders via Alexa; or the many instant responses of bots we now receive in response to consumer activity or complaint, tasks advertised as AI-driven involve humans, working at computer screens, paid to respond to queries and requests sent to them through application programming interfaces (APIs) of crowdwork systems. The truth is, AI is as “fully-automated” as the Great and Powerful Oz was in that famous scene from the classic film, where Dorothy and friends realize that the great wizard is simply a man manically pulling levers from behind a curtain.

For Gray and Suri, the mythos of “full-automation” is akin the Great and Powerful Oz, famously depicted as a man “manically pulling levers from behind a curtain” in the classic American film.

This blend of AI and humans, who follow through when the AI falls short, isn’t going away anytime soon. Indeed, the creation of human tasks in the wake of technological advancement has been a part of automation’s history since the invention of the machine lathe.

Full text of the article is available here.