Sometimes it gets a little scary
Posted on Sunday, November 27, 2005
at 10:06 AM (permalink)
I may have felt amused and a little titlated by the possibilities of the Amazon A9 street cams, but then I realized that Amazon also has Turkers working for them. Now I feel a little creeped out. So there is an autonomous economic model in place that says if enough people ask Big Search to see something, eventually people will be paid microcents somewhere in the world to take a picture of it and feed it back to Big Search. ... So what happens if Big Search starts asking people to "do things" to retrieve this information? Talk about a global Heisenberg principle. We will be changing the world just by looking at it.
Orwell was about 20 years too late and too focused on politics instead of economics. The drive of Big Search is to "always be growing content," so we can expect more complete coverage and more closer-to-realtime coverage in the future. Amazon's maps now have street by street photographic coverage of many cities. Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to 
