In the early days of AI, scientists thought they would be able to build an intelligent computer by the end of the 20th century. This raised various fears about computers eventually taking over the world, and human beings replaced by robots.
Not only this did not happen yet but we are very far from this!
But what is even worse is that we are now following a somewhat opposite trend. There are many tasks at which humans are far better than computers, but instead of trying to build better algorithms for these tasks, people are now trying to find ways to better make use of human intelligence, or rather to automate this usage!
Two examples of this: Luis von Ahn's "Artificial artificial intelligence" and Amazon's "Mechanical Turk".
Luis von Ahn has designed a couple of internet games whose purpose is to make players perform useful tasks such as labeling images. Amazon is taking this to the industrial scale (although not as a game anymore) by allowing people to design programs which include calls to web services which are actually executed by paid humans (e.g. your program calls "translate(text)" and the text is sent to someone who translates the text and return the result)!
Update (21/12/2006): I found a related article in the Boston Globe, citing other examples of the same kind, such as Mozes Mob, a cell phone Q&A service powered by humans.
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