Synopsis

Tasker is an automated interactive chess board, robot arm, and video.

Gallery visitors are invited to play chess moves on a wooden, tournament style chess board closely modelled on the set that Garry Kasparov played against IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. Their opponent is a robot arm that responds to their moves, making moves, taking pieces, much like a human player. Whilst the gallery player may think they are playing a chess AI system, in fact after each of their moves the chess system posts a task or HIT (Human Intelligence Task) on the Amazon remote labour platform mTurk. The resulting move, executed by the robot arm, has been chosen by a remote mTurk worker.

Tasker seeks to highlight the collective and collaborative intelligences behind artificial intelligence and its emergent qualities. It explores the globalised distribution of labour that underpins many machine learning ‘AI’ systems and the ethical issues that arise from this.

Technical

Tasker is created using a custom-made chess board with RFID tags, python, AWS' MTurk and the UR5e robotic arm.

Credits

A project by Sarah Selby and Rod Dickinson (based on an earlier prototype 'Deep Blue Fake')

Curated by Dr Denise Doyle

Commissioned by The University of Wolverhampton