We’re excited about the potential of harnessing the power of crowds in human-computer interaction. It’s already been used in creative ways using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which taps into an online workforce and Wikipedia, a massive volunteer project.

At the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing systems, a workshop on crowdsourcing pointed us towards the future - computers powered by human brains. Applications currently underway include the likes of computer scientist Michael Bernstein at MIT who has developed a plug-in for Microsoft Word, it works like a spell checker, but it’s powered by humans, who shorten documents and proof-read. Chunks of a document are sent to the many brains of Mechanical Turk where they leave edited and are automatically reassembled into Word.

Clearly human-powered apps are on the up, as there are so many tasks humans do with ease online that computers cannot. A plug-in for Photoshop which crops out people or objects, or a search engine that ranks in cuteness? See more here and here via New Scientist.