It's funny but understandable that the future never looks much like how people popularly predict it. Not to completely discount statistics, weather forecasts, or the notion of planning ahead, all of which have their uses. To boil it down, the farther ahead you attempt to predict, the uncertainties keep piling themselves on one another to throw snarls into your pretty line graph.
For this very reason, I like to read science fiction books about the future: they just say so much about the political present in which they were written (as well as the writer's own opinions, you might point out with an "obviously"). I've reached a "reader's block" with my current read (A Mote in Time) for unrelated reasons, but it's just funny to see how the author's parced up space territory among the different nation-states of today not too much evolved over a thousands-of-years time span from the 1980s. The same thing that tickles my fancy when I watch Firefly reruns, with its many allusions to anything Chinese. And it couldn't be any other way. We write for an audience of our peers, after all.
The same thing the concept of "robot." On one hand, we have the Japanese Actroid repping it for humanoid AI and on the other hand, we have internet "bots" (1) that do automated tasks humans would otherwise have to slave to do because of the repetitive and mundane nature of the tas---- WAIT.(2)
Continuing on the "bot" thread, there's CAPTCHA. You know, those annoying tests that generally appear at the login page of a website. A distorted image of text and/or numbers (audio for the visually impaired) is displayed, and your part is to type this into the text form below to prove that you're human. This was aptly described in some article I read as "a reverse Turing Machine" (3). In theory, CAPTCHAs are human-solvable only, but in practice they're often tricky to decipher because of distortions (and more sophisticated programs can solve them, rendering them obsolete, but I'm not about to pretend to understand how; it's beyond my humanities-programmed brain).
For your information, CAPTCHA is apparently a loose acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." Don't ask me what "loose acronym" means (not a "bacronymn"? is it the "test to tell" bit throwing the perfection of the acronym out of alignment?).
A couple of weeks ago, I heard from a summer school classmate that (and I'm quoting an article, not said classmate, but this was the gist of it:) "researchers... are using anti-spam puzzles to develop smarter, more humanlike algorithms" (4). This topic was particularly relevant because we were in the same Chinese class and discussing how computers can scan and read human texts (like Google books). This is trickier with handwritten texts and even more so with complex Chinese character.
God knows I don't know how this works, but it's kind of diabolical, the tool that incidentally destroys exactly what it intends to protect against. Judging by the amount of CAPTCHAs I fill out on a weekly basis, that body of data must be huge.
Along the same thread, I believe, is online translation technology (older Altavista Babelfish translations were way more unintelligible than today's, if you can believe) and the automatic beta Closed Captioning that I recently noticed on YouTube (right now, complete rubbish, but I'm hoping it get better quick).
As I was "researching" this article (read: aimlessly clicking through a host of links, pausing at anything that could distract me), I came across "CAPTCHA data entry." In fact, the notion was referred to me by the rather annoying and only occasionally helpful Google Instant, which seems to signal some popularity behind the phrase.
The reasoning behind "CAPTCHA data entry" is not difficult to puzzle, if somewhat ironic. If CAPTCHA is meant to foil bots, then the obviously obvious solution is to use people instead. Spammers hire people to remove the barrier and solve CAPTCHAs, so they can go on spamming. Those who do the repetitive task of CAPTCHA data entry are primarily in developing countries like India, China, and Bangladesh. Really diabolically obvious solution, although apparently its lucrativeness is questionable, which makes it maybe not so viable. An NYTimes article covers the topic here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26captcha.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=technology
Shutting my pie hole now,
Kim
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(1) I'm fairly sure that the internet "bot" derives from "robot." If this is not the case, consider everything henceforth written in this post irrelevant.
(2) From my day job, most people would equate my online presence a spambot.
(3) My college instructors always pointed out how sloppy I was at attributions.
(4) http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21519/page1/
