Google’s new Image Labeler service is a game that asks you and a random partner somewhere on the Internet to come up with tags to describe an image. The tags you two independently create are applied to the picture. This simple game corrects for many kinds of bogus or poorly thought-out entries (though it will limit the aggregate intelligence of the two raters to the lowest of the two).

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow about a new Google “service”: disguised as a game, the Image Labeler is used to collect data about images – a medium that is notoriously hard for search engines to work with. Tim O’Reilly calls these bionic software, I’d stay with the term coined by Amazon: Mechanical Turks.

Whatever you call it, I find these thingies incredibly fascinating. Somehow, it takes us a step further to the vision of human brains embedded into machines. Seems like we are slowly realising that the human brain is several magnitudes more flexible and adaptable than every processor we can think of now (right now).

So, when you’re bored, you know what you have to do. Can you feel the wiring being attached to your spine?

Tagsoup: bionic software, collective intelligence, future, games, google, hivemind, images, mechanical turk