singley.org > blog archives > Help the Machine, It'll Help You 07.09.2007

In last month's Wired Magazine, there was a fantastic article on tasks for which the human brain is still superior to the computer. For instance, selecting words to describe a photo. You can write software to pick out shapes, names of picture files and words used to link to that file, but those often miss the nuances of something as complex as a photograph. So Luis von Ahn, the subject of the article, wrote a game where two players at a time see the same image and generate a list of words they'd use to describe it. The goal is to come up with words that you think the other player would also use. This, apparently, is not only an oddly addictive game but a brilliant way to find the most useful words to describe a picture.

Von Ahn was also the inventor of those groupings of distorted letters, called Captchas, that you'll sometimes see when signing up for an account on a website. Humans can easily tell that a distorted "A" is still an "A," but machines have a harder time.

Captchas are now being used not only for website security, but also to help the Internet Archive's project to scan public-domain books. The idea works like this: you'll see a two-word captcha. The first will be used to verify that you're not a robot to the website you're on, the second is a word that the Internet Archive's scanner had a hard time deciphering. You type in the letters for both words. After enough people type the same thing for that second word, the correct letters are sent to the Archive so they get an accurate scan of their works. Simple, clever and helpful!

It all got me thinking about the power of the human brain. The tasks I just described are simple, but they processing they take are not. How to you describe a flower? Or a CD cover? Or your mom? Simple things for us, nearly impossible for a computer.

The article also hints at the possibilities that could come out of harnessing people's intelligence en masse. I am fundamentally a believer in technology as a way to connect people, and connecting people so they can describe and create things is very exciting. I think that in the coming years we'll start to see more and more ways that collective intelligence evolves with the help of, and in the service of, better technology.

A nice distillation of these ideas and the power of the human/computer connection was captured in a short video by Anthroplogy Professor Michael Wesch: The Machine is Us/ing Us.