Wednesday, April 16, 2008

People Power

With the recent surge in interactive social applications on an internet-wide scale, the role of gofai machine learning techniques for solving knowledge-rich applications seems to be on a sinking boat. The phenomenon of Swarm Intelligence where actual intelligent people are helping each other solve problems is starting to manifest in neat ways! Thanks to folksonomy services and the web 2.0 infrastructure! For example, I have a feeling that people will stop using the current look and feel search engines like Google to find good and reliable information.

People are better today at most common real world tasks compared to the machines. Actually, people have just been using these machines to facilitate them concentrate on the harder problems and let these machines take care of the easier tasks. With interactive workbench systems coming up that allow people to empower these systems, people productivity is improving tremendously! I have a feeling that the mature web will be an intelligent network with personal people portals that will satisfy all his/her content based needs.

The need for machines helping us manage our content based needs are emerging in a different fashion - the object of these systems are changing from the content to the actual people behind it. Where is machine learning headed to in such a case - an interesting technical insight comes from John Langford's post.

Welcome to the new world of Human Computing!

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