Isaac Asimov’s classic short story about the super computer answering the question, “is there a God,” has lead to fears of technocracies in the Matrix, Doomsday in the Terminator and nihilist jokes among you and your friends no doubt: We’re being replaced by computers. Well, it turns out that computers need our help! Some key advances are introduced…

Let’s briefly take this back into history the last time machines replaced humans. The industrial revolution. Picking cotton, operating looms and steam power and motoring things around was fast! But accuracy was lacking and humans returned to fine-tune details in the finished product.

Not to fear, a handmade shirt is quaint and a mass produced polo is certainly wearable, but it’s still the Canali button-up cotton dress shirt selling for $295 that represents ultra high-quality in every sense. The machines do their best with human oversight to provide the raw materials and initial stitching, but it’s wickedly persniketty human oversight that results in a dress shirt you first assume to be nothing outstanding; then you wear it. It’s both uncompromising from the wearer’s perspective and ravishingly flattering from the outside. It’s magic. And it takes man and machine.

So now, to the news… The most acclaimed tech news aggregator site in the World, Techmeme is compiled by an algorithm kept secret by its creators. Just recently, a four-header staff of editors (where once there was one person) double-checks hourly entries to avoid repeats in news and relavance of content. Source

Mark Cuban knew that the human-connection was superior to the frightful, sometimes comical, work of only machines when he announced Mahalo It’s his “human-powered search engine” that means, Hello! in native Hawaiian (that explains the big flower in the logo). It was seen as revolutionary, slow to build, but now serves as a nice little detour from giants like Google and Yahoo and, perhaps, Bing. Topic pages are gloriously helpful and eternally topical since they are the results of both modern human searches and human-filtered results.

Along similar lines, Computers Can’t Answer Everything is a TechnologyReview.com story about a start-up very cleverly trying to do what you always wanted to do: They’re taking all your Social Network connections from Facebook, Twitter, etc and connecting them into one place where you can ask questions in human form to be answered both by friends in your network, and new friends around the Internet via San Francisco-based, Aardvark

Have a Facebook account and visit. You’ll be invited to join by linking in and allowing Aardvark permissions to attach to your profile. You’ll become a goto source for your interests. Interestingly, popular Aardvark Topics include: Music, Politics, Cycling, Investing, iPhones, Dogs, Cooking and Restaurants (ahem!). Do you already blog about some of these things?

My first question after signing up had everything to do with my interests and knowledge: “can the spyder3 monitor calibrators do the work with a plasma TV as well on LCD and CRT? which affordable monitor calibrator do you use for your photography workflow? thanx,” asked a photographer Facebook user from New York outside of my Facebook network. Just the same, I was instantly able to provide a real answer. Impressive, eh?

I think that services like Aardvark are a brilliant and catchy way to tie together all the techno-crap that we’ve been sticking our emails onto and signing up for in the last six to seven years. It’s a personal site Forum with less risk of derailing crap-post/spamming human intervention (the downfall of any good Forum). It’s intimate, connects you directly to people who can help and with humans being back from news to personal questions, the next time you ask if there is a God, you’ll hopefully get a more comforting answer!