SEATTLE, Aug. 28 -- There was no press conference. No farewell statement from a named executive. On Tuesday, Amazon posted a brief notice on the Mechanical Turk website: "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026." Twenty-one years of crowdsourced human labour, concluded in two sentences.

For the hundreds of thousands of gig workers who have logged into Mechanical Turk at some point to complete digital tasks for fractions of a dollar, that notice is the end of a livelihood and a particularly stark illustration of what the AI economy looks like for the people it was built on.

Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence" when he launched it in 2005, bo...