The "stranger than fiction" department

Things are happening, baby.

Five years ago, people looked at me real funny when I talked about how evolving AI would displace humanity in 50 or so years... Okay, well most of them still look at me funny if I make the mistake of trying this topic on the unprepared -- but there's less and less reason for them to. This stuff is going mainstream, although apparently behind most people's backs. But it won't be long now before the whole "AI is impossible" crowd will have to go the same route as their "flying is impossible" forebears, and start asking "how much does it cost, and what features are in the next release?"

Ripped from the headlines example -- from today's Wired News: This Is a Computer on Your Brain. Check it out.

People will be hooked up with computers, but in an amusing twist -- the PEOPLE are actually providing the computing power to the computers! The human brain's high-performance image recognition capability is being put to use to SPEED UP THE COMPUTER'S ability to identify images of terrorists (or whatever of interest).

But the bottom line is the rapid evolution of the human computer hybrid. Stay tuned!

LATE UPDATE -- okay, okay, enough already, we get the drift! -- see this story, also from today, at Bodyhack (a blog focused on such issues), on the more typical kind of hybrid, where we extend ourselves by "artificial" means.