Luis Von Ahn is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. In 2006 he gave a Google Tech Talk presentation about Human Computation. I found it to have a significant impact on my views about technology.

Von Ahn’s doctoral thesis was on Captcha.  Captcha is the system which prompts us to retype scrambled letters for access to email or other services.  He mentions Captcha in this video but quickly segues into showing how computer games can be used to harness labor.

– Adam Smith-Kipnis