MacArthur Fellowship for Bionic Software

Tim's been talking about bionic software—software that uses people, rather than the other way around. His canonical example is the Mechanical Turk, but recently he hailed Google Image Labeler as an example of bionic software hitting the mainstream. Another data point: while we were all away at EuroOSCON, the creator of the ESP Game that became Google Image Labeler, Luis von Ahn, was just awarded the MacArthur Genius grant. If you use the civilian Internet, you probably use Luis's work every day: he also invented CAPTCHAs. For more from Luis, see his Google tech talk.