Balance between Man and Machine

I am involved with a search/linking/directory service at work. Because of that I found the recent radar a very interesting read. One quote (of many):

 Mahalo is placing a bet on human intervention in search results; Wikia Search on the power of making its ranking algorithms open and transparent (a la open source software). But both are trying to re-draw the boundary between human and machine. 

Rather than making a bad job of summarizing, I refer you over to radar. I think the very rapid fall of the stock markets over the last few weeks, and the subesquent flapping, is an indication that we didn’t find the right balance just yet. But, as is said in the article, at least trading can and will be stopped if changes are too big too quickly. Internet-facilitaded interaction between ”machines” in other areas isn’t necessarily dampened by similar human intervention…