Gamification of Bitch work

Jobs come in all shape and sizes, some are exciting, some are well paying, some are challenging and some downright boring. Unless you’re a CEO with a full time secretary who does all your boring stuff for you, there will be parts of your job/life that are irritating, thoroughly non-stimulating but still have to be done.

Eg: Formatting a word doc, checking it for typos, uploading and filing your expenses, etc.

How do you escape from this misery of small boring tasks getting in your way and preventing you from changing the world?

Get a secretary/valet: If you could, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Get the software that does this for you: You could use the latest fancy software that automates most of your bitch and live peacefully but there are two caveats to this. Software isn’t free and computers can do a lot but they can’t do everything (yet).

But humans can.

And humans are!

People are spending increasingly larger parts of their lifetimes playing games and surfing and socializing online. As phones become cheaper and more ubiquitous, the amount of time people waste doing something stupid on their devices is only going to get larger. 

So how is this connected to helping you reduce bitch work? It is . .

These teeming masses present a giant opportunity to get stuff done.
They offer you chance to turn nobody’s problem into everybody’s problem.
If you have a boring task that no one wants to do, gamify it and make everyone do it. 

Two examples follow:

ReCaptcha

Researchers wanted to digitize ancient books and preserve them and also make them available to the masses.

Simple task, 2 steps: 

       1. Take hi-res photos of each page of the book
       2. Get the text out of the photos and reconstruct the whole book.

Step 1 can automated to a certain extent, you can build a machine that goes through the book page by page and snaps photos. Only useful if the book isn’t in a delicate condition.

Step 2 can also be automated. OCR techniques are pretty powerful and can easily identify characters. But these ancient texts offer a couple of unique challenges:

1. Most of them we’re written by hand and due to different writing styles, standard pattern matching doesn’t work as effectively as it does otherwise.

2. In many cases, the paper has worn out and the writing is barely legible

So the onus falls on the humble human to look at page after page of ancient text and type out what is written on the page. A task that is incredibly boring (unless you’re looking at kamasutra!) and will take eons of time to complete (given the number of texts that are waiting to be digitized)

So whats the way the out of this?

We can upload all the photos on a website and ask people the world over to come and transcribe the texts for us, we could also give them badges for completing a certain number of words and make a leaderboard so people can compete. This will attract a few thousand people but they’ll most likely be history buffs, the kind of people who would’ve done this stuff for free anyway.

How do we get the rest of the world to do this, maybe drop in a few million dollars and pay people to do it. But how much will you pay!

And no one will want to want to say that he tries to make sense of fuzzy words for a living.

How do we get millions of people to look at fuzzy words and make sense of them?

Heard of CAPTCHA’s? They’re these images websites use to make sure you’re human. Identifying accurately the words from a fuzzy image is still considered a surefire way to ascertaining the fact the you’re a human (or that you’re a computer program that’s equally smart by the Turing test )

Eureka moment! On one side you have this vast pool of words from ancient texts waiting to recognized and on the other side you have this huge bunch of humans trying to prove that their actually human so that they can successfully create profiles on dating sites and finally get laid! :D

ReCaptcha wonderfully connects these two, everytime some website wants to serve a CAPTCHA instead of generating a fuzzy image, it instead shows one from ReCaptcha’s database of images.

Phylo

To find out what mutations occurred that caused a separation of species researchers have to sit and painstakingly align huge sequences of DNA. Another boring task. So the researchers at the McGill University in Canada created a game out of this whole process. In Phylo, players get points get points for aligning coloured blocks and minimize mismatches. Not something that thoroughly entertaining but a good example of the process of gamifying bitch work.

Take a boring task, map it to an interesting front end which like playing/using, get the boring task done.

This presents an interesting new paradigm for gaming and a different way for gaming companies to make money.

Gaming can be done with a purpose and at least people can be tricked in to doing productive/meaningful stuff as a part of the game. Imagine a day when big universities pay gaming companies to insert such puzzles into their game (instead of burdening researchers with such work) or a day when Gaming companies stop asking you to pay for upgrades but instead make you solve more puzzles or do other task to earn those upgrades (WIN-WIN-WIN situation:You get the upgrade, Gaming company gets paid for getting the task done, University gets the boring part of the research finished).

Imagine a day when you want to file some bills, you’ve got photos of each bill but now you have to pore over each to extract the payment location, date, items, etc. Tedious boring work. Now imagine if you drop this task into a game like SimCity where people will digitize those bills as a part of them game! They get more points, you get fully digitized bills and the gaming company gets more engagement.

I think these ideas are but the tip of the iceberg in getting humanity to solve its own problems using massive distributed computing resources.