Symbiosis of human brains and the web...

George Johnson notes that the web has stripped the word algorithm (a recipe for solving problems step by step) of its innocence. The algorithms used by Google search, Amazon, MySpace, etc. perform an intelligence amplification, leveraging human thinking with machines in the service of selling more goods. The boundary between human and computer responses increasingly blurs. Submit or change a Wikipedia article and "a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections." Here is the PDF of Johnson's article.