Human Computation in the Wild

Abstract

One of the backbones of human society has been finding ways to organize human labor to achieve desired outcomes. The advent of computing has allowed us to bring to bear the ideas and tools of computing to this task, giving rise to what we are now calling “human computation.” Unlike mechanical computers, which are sufficiently developed and formalized that we can write down on paper an abstract representation of an algorithm and have reasonable expectations about its behavior, human computation bottoms out at fallible, unpredictable people, and, at least at present, no amount of talking or theorizing replaces the need to see what happens when you pull people together in some new way in service of some human-computation-based effort. We’re still in the early years of human computation, and our growing understanding of the field is occurring by people building real systems with real people achieving real outcomes.