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:
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.
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.
