Can humans and machines work together to tackle 'wicked' challenges?
Despite development of increasingly intelligent computers, scientists from Cornell University and the Human Computation Institute in Fairfax, Va., say that they wouldn鈥檛 leave the task of solving the world鈥檚 most complex problems 鈥� from environmental to economic to social 鈥� to computers alone.
Instead, the researchers call for a sophisticated form of聽鈥渉uman computation,鈥� a computer science technique that taps the strengths of humans and computers to accomplish tasks that neither can do alone. A human-computer collaborative system could incorporate human experiences, reason, and creativity into computer intelligence to solve the world鈥檚 most nuanced problems, say researchers in a .
Today, human computation works when computers assign micro tasks to many people, or to sets of people who can analyze and improve on preceding contributions. Wikipedia is an example of how this works. So is , a Google security feature websites use to weed out spammers, and the search giant simultaneously uses to collect wisdom from the crowds.
The reCAPTCHA tool forces people to type the text they see in a box to confirm to a website that they鈥檙e human. In doing this, millions of humans also help Google digitize books by recognizing words that its computers cannot read.
This type of human computation has untapped potential to solve global problems that require real-time, collective intelligence,聽the researchers say.
鈥淢icrotasking alone 鈥� is inadequate for addressing wicked problems, such as climate change, disease, and geopolitical conflict, which are dynamic, involve multiple, interacting systems, and have nonobvious secondary effects,鈥� write the authors, such as聽stymied聽natural disaster relief efforts caused by corrupt government officials who siphon aid money.
"We can draw on human computation methods for stimulating innovation, eliciting new ideas, spreading them around and ," Pietro Michelucci, director of the Virginia institute and co-author on the Science column, told LiveScience.
"Of course, all this has to be fun, easy and quick, so that millions of people actually choose to participate," he said.
One example of this technique already in practice is , a conservation-focused social media site launched by Cornell in 2012 to map efforts by parcel of land based on input from the site's users.
