Always On

A slow but steady cultural transformation is occurring. People are adopting the values of an "always on, always available" world. The internet is at the middle of this transformation, a behemoth of information that continually grows, and allows easy collaboration at any time. More then ever before, are we able to harness people in an integrated network as the world's largest human supercomputer. When you put the millions of people on the internet together to complete specific tasks, there are endless possibilities. An example is chacha.com, which lets you use a live search guide to help you find what you're looking for. Chacha pays people 5 to 10 dollars an hour to help assist its customers.

The power of the internet is just beginning to be harnessed. If every idle moment of time people spend on the internet could be put towards a purpose, much could be accomplished. The time can be taken from many things people already do everyday, and wouldn't affect anyone's day on the internet by much. Take for instance the ReCAPTCHA project. Captchas are common in our internet world. They act to deter the efforts by spammers and hackers (or crackers, whatever your prefer to call them) to create accounts. Captcha's helped prevent these spammer attacks, which were significantly hurting server loads around the world. Now, bot algorithm's are getting more complex, and some are able to determine some captcha's. The ReCAPTCHA project helps by making the text a little harder to read, thus throwing off the bots. But the main point of ReCAPTCHA is to help document pre-computer age books that could not be read by text recognition software. It's done by using two words for the captcha. The first, an unrecognizable word that the person filling in the captcha determines, and the second word, a known word by the computer to verify you aren't a bot. When quite a few people fill out the first word, the word is known because a few people helped to verify what it is. There are similar ideas in the work for things like videos, pictures, and all sorts of digital content. As the internet expands, these are only going to become more common.

The planet is the most powerful supercomputer, and I can't wait to see what kind of things will be done with this massive power in the future.