But could anyone really guess, in advance, how their lives might be affected by instant creativity, instant intelligence, instant happiness?
The commissioner said the city's success in lowering the homicide rate can also be traced to programs like Operation Impact, which increases the police presence in areas where a higher crime rate stubbornly persists, and the Real Time Crime Center, which feeds detectives instant intelligence data.
"A number of intelligence officials have lamented that the practice of strategic intelligence has eroded" in "an emerging information age of instant news bites," Douglas MacEachin, the C.I.A.'s deputy director for intelligence from 1993 to 1995, wrote last year.
Prior to the age of instant communications, intelligence operatives usually targeted international travelers who were known diplomats, military personnel or government contractors — essentially, those individuals most likely to carry sensitive information.
Tamsin Greig, one of the most subtle of actresses, is appealing less because of her singing voice than because of her extraordinary ability to unravel in an instant from wiry intelligence to wobbling despair.
Tuning in to watch him on NBC, on Caesar's Hour once Your Show of Shows ended, was an instant emblem of intelligence.
The new techniques behind instant crowdsourcing makes human intelligence available on demand for the first time.
As Andrew Rawnsley noted in 2007 in the foreword to the Riddell at the Observer exhibition: "His [Chris'] cartoons combine political intelligence with instant accessibility.
That feature of Premier was inspired by a Rochester University research project called Chorus, which created a crowdsourced virtual assistant that could carry on conversations via instant messaging (see "Artificial Intelligence, Powered by Many Humans").
In 1993 Nigam headed the group that built the software system for Time Warner's interactive television pilot project in Orlando, Fla. Nigam had to design the system to accommodate broadcast TV's capacity for continuous transmission to an unlimited number of viewers, and infuse it with the intelligence and instant reaction time of, say, a videogame played by thousands of people at once.
He groped for some way to mitigate it, and what he found, an instant later, was an intelligence-community term of art, a bit of tradecraft jargon having to do with the difference between the on purpose and the incidental, the guilty and the not guilty: witting and not witting, witty and not witty.
