The Biblio File

I’m finally making it through the giant stack of newspapers I’ve been saving all summer, and came across this article in the New York Times that I thought was very interesting. Here, George Johnson is writing about human-computer interaction and pointing out that cyborgs are here, in a sense, and they are us. But rather than the traditional, science-fiction version of cyborg that involves a splicing  “between hardware and wetware,” the reality  is that we are much more subtley (and perhaps seamlessly) blending with the technology around us:

Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.

What’s really interesting here to me is his discussion of how humans are involved in the everyday computing process, vonluntarily filling in the gaps when reh algorithms fail us:

Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined.

What fascinates me about this is a) the degree to which technology is being written so that our everyday usage of it makes it better, and b) the degree to which people are willing to take the time to do it.  There is something unique about the ways in which we have been cultured to think about technology (and interact with it) that makes this possible. For instance, it’s rare when you see someone stop to pick up some trash that isn’t theirs and throw it in a trashcan. But a mispelling on wikipedia often exists for less than five minutes.  I have started reading Everyware, by Adam Greenfield, in which he lays out his theory of the future of ubiquitous computing–in essence, that one day computers (and as a result, information) will be so present and seemless in everything that we do that even the notion of a computer will actually disappear. It seems to me that if this is to happen, the bonds between the person and the network will become increasingly blurred, with the work of one constantly informing the work of the other.

By the way, I tried the Google Image Labeler myself, and it is completely absorbing.