If he'd had a flying car to begin with, of course, this could have been averted

Now that we live in the future - which we do, despite the stunning lack of flying cars and women with short skirts and swoopy haircuts - it's tempting to think that computers can do anything at all. Even though sometimes they do remarkably stupid things (no, I don't want that paragraph in blue - a curse upon you, Microsoft Word), the fact that we have a world-wide network of machines that can swap all kinds of information between themselves for any number of purposes is pretty amazing.

Sadly, there are some tasks that computers just can't do. This is a problem that must be solved before we can fully reach the future, and get our flying cars. In the meantime, though, we can just use humans to do the tricky tasks. Tasks such as finding a plane-shaped object among millions of square metres of scrubland.

The story behind this is as simple as it is worrying. Steve Fossett, world record holder and explorer, went missing this time last week. He's the kind of man who certainly knows what he's doing with a plane, so the fact that no-one's found a trace if him since then is worrying. And, given that the search area being covered is approximately 10,000 square miles, it could take a while.

This is where the Amazon Mechanical Turk comes in. Amazon (yes, the same Amazon of online bookshop fame), having realised that humans are much better than computers for many kinds of tasks, have set up an infrastructure in which people can perform these tasks, a little bit at a time, in return for payment. And this is the perfect kind of mechanism for scrutinising 10,000 square miles of satellite imagery.

The site isn't difficult to use. If you have an Amazon account and ten minutes to spare, please do visit the site and search a few of the images. It may help to find an extraordinary man...and it's one more step toward bring our flying cars to reality.