Scott Andrews / AP

In this file photo, crowds gather for the inauguration of President Barack Obama Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. New computer software is able to tap into the wisdom of crowds to get tasks done.

Computers may eventually outsmart human intelligence, but for now they're just finally getting smart enough to ask humans for help.

That's the basic idea behind MobileWorks, a startup that is weaving crowdsourcing capability into computer software. Crowdsourcing is the concept of putting out a question to your social network to help solve a problem.

In MobileWorks case, software sends tasks to a hand-picked crowd — mostly workers recruited from the developing world such as the slums of India and Pakistan. Many work with a mobile phone. The company says these workers are getting high-tech experience and a "fair wage."

"Much of the criticism that has been leveled at online digital work is that it becomes kind of sweatshop labor," Anand Kulkarni, a cofounder and CEO of MobileWorks, told me today. "Our goal was to start with a livable wage and work forward to construct an effective crowdsourcing system."

And what's that wage? Workers in India on a mobile phone earn about U.S. $0.50 per hour; those with a laptop computer make $1.50.

"These are workers who are earning about $2 per day before joining our systems, so, in a way, what we are paying is enough to make a strong positive impact on their lives," Kulkarni said.

Tasks these workers accomplish include transcribing audio recordings, digitizing handwritten notes and scouring the Internet for contact information of potential job recruits. Many take just a minute or two to complete, which is part of the plan.

The cost to the user of the system is on the order of pennies per task.

To maintain client confidentiality, each task is broken up into tiny bits and distributed to the workforce. When the bits of work are completed, the software stitches them back together and delivers the completed task to the user.

The concept is similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where tasks are solved by a crowd of anonymous workers, though MobileWorks says their hand-picked crowd is faster and more accurate.

And since the workers are handpicked, MobileWorks can rouse them with a quick text message, making sure workers are at the ready when there is work to be done.

"The ability to spin up workers when you need them is very powerful," Michael Bernstein, who researchers crowdsourcing at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who has developed an application to tap into the Mechanical Turk service, told Technology Review.

"On Mechanical Turk your tasks can just stall because not enough people chose to work on them."

More stories on crowdsourcing work:

• Facebook asks users to translate for free
• Charities start to harness the power of the many
• Cash in: 12 ways to earn
• Amazon pushes user-driven research service

Getty Images / Getty Images

Pakistanis and international and local media gather outside Osama Bin Laden's compound, where he was killed during a raid by U.S. Special Forces on May 3 in Abottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden was killed during a U.S. military mission May 2)

Osama bin Laden regularly taunted with propaganda photos and videos that left us asking: where in the world is he? U.S. spy agencies want software that analyzes and quickly identifies where such imagery was made.

Currently, human intelligence analysts pore over propaganda imagery to tease out clues from things such as the geography, vegetation and even the style of clothes worn and gadgets used, and try to match them up with existing images taken from satellites and on the ground.

But this is "an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive activity that often meets with limited success," notes the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency in its announcement for the Finder Program.

The agency is the intelligence community's DARPA, the secretive military research agency that funds similar futuristic-sounding initiatives such as machines that are able to think for themselves.

Computer programmers have already come up with a bunch of fancy tools to manipulate and find information in images, including animation software to trace faces through the years, Facebook's facial recognition program , and a search engine that IDs stars in photos of the night sky.

Google recently launched an image search engine billed as being able to do the type of task IARPA wants, but it's full of kinks. It can't even distinguish George W. Bush from Barack Obama. Reverse image search engine TinyEye  is designed to perform a similar function.

IARPA says these types of consumer-oriented systems are limited because they "tend to work best in geographic areas with significant population densities or that are well traveled by tourists, and where the query image or video contains notable features such as mountains or buildings."

The Finder Program, as its wished-for software is called, "will deliver rigorously tested solutions for the image/video geolocation task in any outdoor terrestrial location."

Work on the program is scheduled to kick off in earnest next January. That hoped-for solution isn't expected until 2016. But when it comes, and even as researchers work on the task, terrorists will have to be ever more careful about what to include in their propaganda imagery.

Tip o' the Log to The Telegraph.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

ESA JHelioviewer Team

A prominence suspended above the solar surface is seen in this screenshot from the program JHelioviewer developed by the European Space Agency. The solar image was taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Sun seekers of the scientific sort need to travel only as far as their computer to get their fill, thanks to new visualization software that puts the entire library of images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory at their fingertips.

The Java-based JHelioviewer allows users to make movies of the sun, add color to the images as they wish. and then process the movies in real time. The data could be used, for example, to make a movie of a mega-filament eruption such as the one experienced earlier this month, or a time-lapse movie of solar storms.

The program gives users access to more than a million images from SOHO, and new images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory  are being added daily. All told, more than 15 years worth of imagery is available.

"We wanted to make it easy to view solar images from different observatories and instruments, and to make it easy to make movies," Daniel Mueller, deputy project scientist on SOHO at the European Space Agency, said in a news release. "Before, it took hours to combine images from different telescopes to make a movie of the sun for a given period. With JHelioviewer, everyone can do this in minutes."

JHelioviewer can be downloaded here. A Web-based image browser, Helioviewer.org, complements the desktop software.

Sun-seekers of another sort can browse these images and daydream about their next beach vacation.

More stories about SOHO and SDO:

• Sun-watching probe turns an amazing 10
• Comet eaten by the sun as spacecraft watches
• Solar tsunamis move at astronomical speed
• Huge solar storm could hit Earth again
• Spectacular sights come from solar probe
• Sun-watching probe launched on second try
• Magnetic loops shown erupting from the sun

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).