Researchers are developing human-powered apps. For example, Soylent, a new editing plug-in for Microsoft Word used to shorten or proof-read documents, breaks documents up into chunks, which are sent to the human-powered Amazon Mechanical Turk for editing and then automatically reassembled back in Word.

This was the topic of a big-picture discussion behind the Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, B.C.