Ethics versus Human Computation

You might have heard about the Human Computation. The basic idea is that there are lots of problems that human can solve but computers can not. In fact, we are able to crack many problems by making good use of human power.

Just to give you an idea of how human power is wasted, let me give you two numbers: Over nine billion human hours of solitaire were played in 2003. But it took 20 million human hours to build the entire Panama Canal and that’s equivalent to less than a day of people who played solitaire.

ESP game is a good example of exploiting human power to solve a tedious problem. This game is a two-player online game. First player is randomly paired with somebody else and they are not allowed to communicate with each other. Both of players need to type the exact same word given the common image in order to score. The best strategy is to type a lot of words related to the image until they agree on a same word. Once they get point they proceed to the next image. This word must be a very good word since it comes from two independent sources. Interestingly, this game turns out to be an excellent technique to label images. Actually, The ESP game could label all images of Google Image less than a week!

Peek-A-Boom game is more sophisticated and tries to identify different objects of an image with applying the same idea of ESP game. A little statistics from the first four months of the game: 27,000 players; 2,100,000 pieces of data; many people played 120 hours in the first 10 days!!!

Verbosity is another game which is not yet released. It collects common sense facts; e.g. a man has two legs. Computers unlike human technically don’t have common sense facts. If we could somehow put common sense facts into computers, we could potentially make them more intelligent.

Watch this if you are interested to learn more about these games.

From one point of view, it would be great if we could figure out how to apply this concept for everything. But from an ethical point of view, people will end up spending their work hours playing the game rather than their free time hours, so we may not gain any productivity in fact at all. I admit that any player knows the purpose of the game beforehand and the game doesn’t trick players into doing anything. But people are not reimbursed for the hours they have spent to play. This poses another argument that people enjoy playing the game and in reality we pay to have any kind of fun and in this case we pay with minutes of life we have earned for free. Even some people improve their English language by playing such a game!