Hunch, Or the Turing test for the Web

Quick post via Tech Crunch:

Earlier today Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced the release of her latest startup, Hunch, in private beta. The site revolves around helping users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics. To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. It’s a great idea that combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with services like Yahoo Answers. But does it work? We’ve managed to get our hands on an invite to the service, and have put it to the test.

Sounds kind of nuts, right?  Hunch basically will be the closest thing to web-based artificial intelligence. This is kinda/sorta reminiscent of the Turing test, one of the earliest experiments in Artificial Intelligence.

I’m not sure how to read the politics of this yet. It’s easy to say that by outsourcing decision-making to an algorithm is the most sophisticated form of control. And on some level, that may be right. But what are some conceptual openings provided by something like Hunch? Will it lead us to finally put to the grave the idea of “critical reason” as most famously imagined by Kant and then virulently defended by the Frankfurt school? And lastly, is Hunch the signalling of a new trend in web-based computing which is still so rooted in what I’ve been calling on this blog the dominant “culture of search” that has such a strong hold on Web practices?

Let’s see…