the zeitgeist report

Humans are still useful:

Speaking to a room filled with Internet developers at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, Luis Felipe Cabrera, Amazon's vice president of software development, outlined a project to harness human intelligence for tasks that computers can't handle well, such as recognizing objects in images.

The backbone of the plan is a Web-services platform called Mechanical Turk . It uses an auction-style system to farm out complex tasks -- complex for a computer, that is -- such as recognizing the difference between a human face and a nearby bush, or accurately transcribing an audio recording. Cabrera likes to call the platform "artificial artificial intelligence" -- it's computers asking humans to do tasks, rather than the other way around.

To illustrate the idea, Cabrera cited a test in which A9.com , Amazon's search engine, asked average users to fulfill "human intelligence tasks" (HITs) -- jobs that computers are notoriously bad at doing, such as picking out one building or business within a photograph of a city block in order to highlight that part of the image in association with a business address.

Not only did participants supply the necessary answers, but they did so "outstandingly fast,"...

Perhaps someone should compile some sort of list of things that people can do better than computers. And somebody should be in charge of the list. And maybe the list shouldn't be on a computer.