Harnessing excess human cycles.
So how long will it be until we are served with banner ads entreating us to attend the ‘can’t-miss’, ‘must-attend’ event for the human computing industry? ‘Hgrid ’08′ in (…of course, where else could it be held?) …Las Vegas!
In an excellent Google Talk presentation entitled “Human Computation”, Luis Von Ahn (a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon) explains how by turning tasks that are easy for humans to process (but hard for computers) into games, he has been able to harness thousands and thousands of hours of ‘human computing cycles.’
One of the games that they have developed is called peekaboom, and having tried it out myself I am somewhat embarrassed to say that it is strangely addictive. Try it, I dare you. (I hate how even when you know about behavioural conditioning and cognitive candy, it is still damn near impossible to resist.) Now the folks in Vegas and elsewhere figured out long ago how much people enjoy a good game, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is how to make a Mechanical Turk really rock & roll.
Much of the theme of this blog is predicated on the fact that far to much of the financial services business still relies on (inefficient) human cycles and that there are great opportunities for those that embrace ‘digital markets’, however I suspect there are great opportunities also to intelligently harness idle or under-optimized human cycles for many (complimentary) tasks that machines just can’t get right. (At least not yet.) There is nothing (interesting) that immediately springs to mind as an example, but I’ll definitely be mulling this over in the months ahead.
