Participatory Productivity
For some reason I read Wired magazine virtually from cover to cover yesterday. I came across an article about Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who has invented a game called Matchin’ where two players compete to accurately describe a series of random pictures found on the web in a given space of time. It doesn’t sound like the most fun you can have with your clothes on to me but apparently it’s very addictive. The key element here though is that the game is using networks of humans to solve problems that computers cannot (describe photographs, make aesthetic judgments etc.) Von Ahn is all about making every time-wasting element of being online productive. He invented Captchas, those stretched and distorted words you often have to type in to fool spammers. His new reCaptcha system is not only fooling spammers but also using humans to translate smudgy words that computers can’t read for the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that is putting public-domain books online for free.
I mention this here because I think that the possibilities of the “global overmind” - millions of human brains working together online to do things that just wouldn’t have been possible before the internet connected them - is fascinating and I’m excited to see what this can lead to in terms of film production and distribution. How are our expectations of what is even possible going to change over the next few years?
I have to say, however, that all this talk about productivity makes me a little nervous. I’ve always been a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut who said: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different. “