I'm curious: What are specific examples of "variety of tasks" and "crowd applications" that the author is talking about? Are we in some kind of cyborg software revolution?
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005...
There are many software applications today that are being seamlessly powered by a combination of human and machine intelligence. For example, Google Books is mainly digitized with OCR but then ReCAPTCHA is used to bring human intelligence for fixing the mistakes of the OCR process.