know | Future

One of my favorite novels of all time is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Central to the plot is an electronic book named as the book is subtitled The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer . What is unique about the book is that it is not only interactive, but part of the most sophisticated interactivity is not managed by some clever computing or artificial intelligence, but rather by actors (called ractors in the book) that provide high level interactivity that would be difficult or impossible to do otherwise. Reuters is carrying an article today that talks about how close we are getting to that ideal. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon has started a service called the Amazon Mechanical Turk that it is using to accomplish tasks such as generating copy edited entries for its website and identifying the correct photograph out of a group. The tasks are farmed out to webnauts that create a membership and receive micropayments (usually $0.03/task) for each task completed.