Carr also warns that centralizing computing power makes it cheap enough that computers could replace humans in certain jobs, shaking up the job market.
Popular online services are already usurping business from more traditional companies that employ far more people. Skype, an Internet calling service popular in Europe, is snatching customers from British Telecom. When eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for about $2 billion, Skype had only 200 employees.
YouTube, the popular video sharing site, also runs mostly on computing power. When Google bought it in 2006 for $l.65 billion, YouTube had only 60 workers.
With the cost of computing power dropping, other professions are likely to feel the pinch. "Any job that requires the interpretation and manipulation of information is a potential target for computer automation," Carr said.
Examples include financial analysts and radiologists who read medical X-rays.
Newspapers have been hit particularly hard by online rivals such as Monster.com and Craigs- list, which siphon away paid classified advertising - adding to pressures that have resulted in staff cuts at many papers.
But there are also hurdles to using large networks of computers to process data and run programs used by hordes of clients.
Last October, Google and IBM gave computer scientists at University of Maryland and five other U.S. universities access to a network of supercomputers, encouraging them to learn how to generate programs that run on multiple machines at once. "When you are normally programming," said professor Lin, "you think, `I'm going to do this and that and then that.' But when you talking about hundreds of processors, you can't think that way."
Jennifer Golbleck, a computer scientist at College Park, has been using the network to study how members of online social networks decide whom to trust. Experiments that take only a few hours to process on the network provided by Google and IBM would take days on her laptop.
Lin cautioned, however, that Web-based activity still accounts for just a fraction of the market.
"We really want to know if this is a passing fad or if it's good science," he said. "With the buzz and the marketing-speak, it's a little difficult to untangle."
chris.emery@baltsun.com
