The consequences of digital
networking for our ways and means of processing complex information are only
beginning to emerge. Yet one can see already with great clarity that digital
networking will not only change the type of problems that may be addressed, but
also method and credit for it. Concepts of intellectual property will never be
the same. By acknowledging the substantial and often critical contribution of
others to the evolution of thoughts, ideas, questions and solutions, we are led
to depart from a “star system” that glorifies individual genius and
contribution toward a more realistic acknowledgment of multiple credits for a
potentially vast number of contributors, without whom certain problems may not
find an answer without engaging vastly greater resources of time and funding.
In science, crowdsourcing means
to out-source research and development tasks to a mass of voluntary but
sometimes unaware users, in some instances through “games” that superficially serve
an entertainment purpose. Crowdsourcing works particularly well if scientific
knowledge can be transferred to an application in so elegant a manner that
users need not understand it.
With crowdsourcing, individual
leadership and ingenuity takes on a different dimension and purpose: turning
into more of a managerial task, the emphasis shifts to finding a way to harness
intellectual resources of the masses and finding a quid-pro-quo that permits
accessing them. In a digitally networked world, it reflects “open innovation,” a changed view of the scientific process,
one that anticipates the participation of as many individuals as possible in
processes of research and development as an increasingly natural form of an
efficient division of labor. This is especially true with regard to
superficially tedious routine work. Zooniverse is a good
example: it enables laymen to analyze cell tissue for cancer research,
categorize galaxies, or sort through weather records in 19th century
marine log entries for purposes of climate research. Sometimes tasks outsourced
to the masses of users are rewarded monetarily, for example by Amazon Mechanical Turk or Crowdflower.
Relying on the contributions of
many is hardly new in human endeavors: the pyramids, the Panama Canal or Neil
Armstrong’s moon walk each engaged a collaborative effort of approximately
100,000 individuals. Crowdsourcing, that is relying on the intellectual
resources of internet users, may enable the involvement of 100 million or more.
Duolingo, a platform offering language learning
resources in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, is free
but has an ulterior motive: by practicing, students “translate the Internet,”
especially Wikipedia, into the languages they aim to discover.
In 2008, David Baker at the
University of Washington created a three-dimensional “puzzle” named Foldit, a
“game with a purpose,” which is to fold proteins in a spatial dimension, a
task that requires immense computing resources but somehow comes a lot easier
to humans. At least to some of them: among 100,000 Foldit aficionados worldwide playing regularly, some particular
talents turned out to be 13 years old and intuitively performing tasks pushing
supercomputers to their limits. Fifty years of molecular biology are packed
into Foldit – but users only need to
turn their models in a variety of directions on their computer screens.
Protein structures may be
conceived as networks, and it is conceivable that users could be tasked with
changing protein networks in a way that strips them of their characteristics in
cancerous cells, thereby inaugurating a breakthrough in cancer therapy. If this
concept is similarly successful as Foldit,
it could result in a 100 times greater output.
There is no shortage of “citizen science”
projects: MIT seeks to enable users to “map” the brain through Eyewire.
The University of Munich has created Artigo, which creates a
competition between users to provide keywords for cataloging archived works of
art. With Geo-wiki, the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis addressed a notorious deficiency in automated analysis of
aerial photographs for the classification of land in connection with potential
use for ethanol production. This in turn inspired the creation
of computer games designed to draw a broader user base. Recaptcha,
by now acquired by Google, is a method based on the reverse application of captcha, the technology used to
authenticate human users online by identifying distorted signs or words. Recaptcha has been designed by Luis von
Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University to harness involuntarily the resources of 750
million computer users world-wide to digitize annually 2.5 million books that
cannot be machine-read.
Game design needs to be based on
reward and recognition of performance. To date, this is typically achieved when
different users arrive at identical solutions. Needless to say, this creates a
risk of rewarding congruent nonsense, an outcome for which non-trivial
solutions have yet to be designed. In spite of such shortcomings, game results
can still improve data quality.
It is easily imaginable that Open
Innovation will eventually require a revolutionary change in the protection and
reward of intellectual property thus created. Some of the difficulties this
presents is the relative anonymity of the web, the small size of individual
contribution, and the random, haphazard, or playful nature of at least some, if
not most of the contributions. But similar challenges have already been
resolved in the design of the class action system: there, benefits to
individual plaintiffs are also typically too small and negligible to justify
pursuit by traditional methods, and the reward largely accrues to the
organizers of the effort. But the social purpose, namely the disgorgement of
profits of a mass tortfeasor, may well be compared to the creation of another
social good in the form of R&D resulting from, or at least significantly
augmented by, a large number of only marginally interested contributors.
Collective reasoning and
collaborative creativity may yet ring in an era of division of labor and profit
by a mass collective that is organized not along political ideology, but around
the opportunities and incentives created by networked technology and pooled
human talent.