Wisdom of Crowds

Or "Crowdsourcing" and my evolving thinking.
The following is interesting, but mostly, to me as to the application of AI.
"This turns out to be the perfect division of labor between man and machine: Evaluating content is easy for people, and analyzing large data sets is easy for computers."

Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work - Management News by InformationWeek:

Collective Insight

"VP of engineering Adam Bosworth last year wrote that Google's success in making a more relevant search was based on "leveraging the wisdom of crowds," referring to the company's PageRank algorithm. (James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom Of The Crowds, was published in 2004 by Random House.) Company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the business on PageRank, which analyzes the human-generated link structure of the Web to determine the relative importance of a Web page. As PageRank sees it, the more people link to a given page, the more important that page is likely to be.

This turns out to be the perfect division of labor between man and machine: Evaluating content is easy for people, and analyzing large data sets is easy for computers. By marrying collective intelligence with automation, Page and Brin built a company fueled by artificial intelligence. "AI is a great tool for helping people make better decisions," Merrill says. "It's not so good at making complex decisions."

The wisdom of the crowd, farmed and refined by machine, remains critical to Google. As Merrill puts it, "All of us together are smarter than any of us individually." That insight may not be as surprising now that it has been reinforced by the likes of Wikipedia and Digg.com, but it's still mostly lip service at many other companies."

I'm pondering the difference(s) between "Crowdsourcing" as applied to Intangibles, such as software, vs. Tangibles, such as ... Cars. Hardware has a much longer amortization period, much harder to change once the design is set. Software, esp. in the case of Google, is very much an evolving product, and there is virtually no "installed base" (on the customer's machine/device/interface)