One thing that I find interesting about this company is that they offer the service for free, but definitely have to pay people to tag. My guess is that the company will eventually profit from collecting a database of searchable images, which can be profitably sold at a later time. Though I'm sure there will be other methods for the company to make money.
The other interesting component is the issue of audio and visual recognition, which we have been discussing in class. It could be said that this problem dates back to the 1950's when Alan Turing wrote a paper about artificial intelligence. The Turing Test is when "a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test." This applies to instances where people have to prove their humanity online, like when ordering from ticketmaster and people have to type in the masked word that they see. I think that we will eventually have very precise image and audio recognition; we already have vocal recognition programs, though they usually need to be trained to pick up an individual's vocal patterns (which isn't much different from when a human being has to adopt to listen to a person he or she just met - my Cognitive professor called this "fundamental frequency"). In any event, there would be tradeoffs to this sort of technology. Do we really want a world where we are entirely unable to distinguish humans from computers? I love technology, but I fear competition from artificial intelligence. Naturally, it is a cost-benefit analysis and we may be far from developing the technology. Or we may already have it.
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