 For this session, I want to share some of my current work, a book I'm working on called COG, as sort of a way of starting to tie things up for our final day. Trying to give a sense of, for those law school or grad school students among us who want to go into academia, some idea about how one particular guy goes about trying to find a topic and delve into it. And also, as a way of thinking about the role of doctrine and where learning the law fits in to some of the ideas. There won't be much doctrine in this talk, as in previous talks, at least of mine, there has not. But that's not because it's not there. It's just, as we try to figure out over the span of a week what to put into the precious time we have loading it up, we made some decisions about not trying to do a survey course in patent, in copyright, in defamation law, et cetera, et cetera. Even though all of these would be helpful, we're hoping that some of the other substantive courses are picking up on that. Anybody who's taken copyright with Terry, I think, can attest to the way in which that's done. And because I think all of us seek larger themes. All in the back of our minds, we're looking for answers to the law of the horse question that Easterbook posed and that Larry focused upon us. So with that, let me tell you how I came upon this topic. First, I was intrigued by a study by a grad student at NYU named Casey Kinzer. She did a rather unusual thing. She fashioned small cardboard robots, put a smiley face on them, put a flag on them indicating where they wanted to go, went to Radio Shack and got a motor that propelled them forward at a slow but constant rate. And then she released them on the streets of New York City. And to her surprise, many people intervened to help get the robots to where they wanted to go. So here, for example, is one chart of a robot's path through Washington Square Park as it started in the northeast corner and over 40 people intervened, complete strangers, to see it safely to its desired destination in the southwest corner. Now, like most NYU ITP projects, my reaction first was, that's really interesting. My second reaction was like, what does it mean? And I'm not entirely sure I know, except that it bears some more than passing resemblance to internet routing. It's like, hey, they're passing the laser pointer along. But it also says something about the topics that Yochai broached yesterday having to do with, you can get strangers to do things that are helpful to your cause without necessarily having to pay them. In fact, if you went up to people watching and scrolled, I'll give you a dollar if you move the robot. You might get lower participation rates than if you just let the robot race ipsa locutor. So a lot of books have been made about some aspect of this new phenomenon facilitated by the internet, although in that case the robot didn't necessarily need the internet, in which people end up coming together to produce new things of the mind or to make something happen in the world. My favorite of these, I think, is Clay Scherke's Here Comes Everybody. Last night I was talking with the I4BI group about the time that Clay actually didn't turn up for a conference. He was supposed to come up and speak at his plane got delayed or something. And I was subbed in as the alternate, which is never a good circumstance in a conference. Like, hi, I'm not William Shatner, but. And I did, so long as I could title the talk, Here Comes Everybody except Clay Scherke. So anyway, my own book has a chapter devoted to Wikipedia and a form of cooperation, a kind of qualitative analysis that parts of which resonated with yesterday's talk. And this was the cover that Yale University Press wanted to suggest for it. And I was not blown away by this cover, especially because John Palfrey and I had our book, Access Denied, coming out the same month. And it also featured a large hand saying stop on the cover. And it seemed like enough was enough with the hands. So they came back with this, which I also wasn't that excited about because I'm not sure what an American stoplight has to do with the book except the word stop is in the title and the 8-bit font is kind of annoying. But instead of just being a naysayer, I was like, wait a minute, my book is about in part the distributed intelligence of the net. Why don't we have the net make the cover for the book? So I went to a site called worth1000.com as in a picture is worth 1000 words. This is a site that people visit and hang out at if they have really good Photoshop skills of which there are many people and nothing else to do. So there's tons of people on the site and they engage in contests to see who can Photoshop the best photo according to a set of criteria. So I put up a contest for a couple hundred bucks, do the cover to my book. And I got several dozen entries for which this was the winner. It was from a guy named Ivo Vander Int in Holland, whom I've never met and probably never will. And I liked it, although it did seem a little bit, say, less agonian in its apocalyptic suggestion. So $50 over PayPal later and that became the cover to the book. And I don't know, I thought it was better than the stoplight or the large hand saying stop. And I felt good about it. It's like, ah, yes, the medium is the message. Then I started thinking about the entire range of emerging platforms that let you attempt through a messy mix of incentives, extrinsic and intrinsic to try to get help at a distance from any number of people as quickly as you need it. And I kind of, in my own mind, started to array it in a rough pyramid that there were tasks that were really complicated, hard to do, requiring a lot of skill. We put those at the top of the pyramid. And they probably will cost a lot if money is the currency to try to get them done. Not that it always is, but if it is, it's going to be the costly tasks. Then as you move down the pyramid, you can get to tasks that are so easy to do, all you basically need to have is a pulse. And maybe the markets would drive the costs of those tasks down. And you can get a whole bunch of people ready to do those tasks. And now I just want to give a quick tour of this pyramid from top to bottom with some of the emerging platforms that still most people haven't even heard of. And then start to share some worries about it, despite the fact that it at least produced one book cover. At the very top of the pyramid, we might put the X Prize Foundation, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to spend the money that they want to give for the social good in an entrepreneurial way. They stake a prize like 10 million or 20 million dollars to the first team of people that can land something on the moon, take some pictures and bring it back. Or maybe stay there, I don't know. Or to get a reusable launch vehicle up and back. Or to invent a car that works on 150 miles per gallon. When they make these prizes, lots of teams come together to win them. They get one. And as they get one, they find out the money is leveraged. It turns out actually that more money gets spent by the teams to win the prize than the prize is worth. Which turns out for society to be a pretty good deal for the team that comes in second on the X Prize, it's less. But the point is to motivate activity around a worthy social goal. If you actually read the fine print of the X Prize Foundation, in the Frequently Asked Questions section it says, who owns the rights to what is produced for the X Prize? And the fact says you do, applicant. If you read the fine print of the Terms of Service of the website, it says X Prize owns every submission that comes in to the site. These do not appear reconcilable. So I wrote to the X Prize people and it's just like, and they said they'd get back to me. They hadn't noticed the discrepancy, which is sort of weird. You'd think they'd have that part of the model worked out and we have not yet heard back from them. I wrote them in August, so they're still thinking about it. I think their lawyer, who's also their chief financial officer, was on vacation. I hope not in like a jurisdiction that, well anyway, I was just thinking about money flows. Anyway, down the pyramid even further, inoscentive, which could have been introduced, and maybe even was, and I missed it, as an example of a new networked economy. This is from pharma giant Eli Lilly, a marketplace for people, but mostly firms, that have hard technical problems, not easily solvable in-house with their rather kind of ossified structure for employment. They've got some engineers on this and that, but they don't know the answer to a particular engineering problem. They can put it out on inoscentive for a bounty. So here's how they describe it. Companies represented here by armless people send money through a 1992 laptop to scientists arranged as It's a Small World After All, who then solve the challenges for the money that comes through their computers. The most interesting and useful piece of the slide is the vernacular of seekers and solvers. So a company with a problem is a seeker, and if you think you can solve the problem, you, like, have Photoshop and scientific skills and nothing to do, you can be a solver. And the solvers gather in project rooms where they interact at arm's length with this anonymous company, trying to give something worthy of the bounty that the company has offered for a solution. So this is an example, $20,000 to the first person that can solve the problem of browning in juice. Juice that's kind of outside like one of these sessions. We have the good stuff out there. We have the top shelf Tropicana. Times are still good at Harvard Law School. If the endowment went down just a tick, we'd get the from concentrate Tropicana and the translucent containers. And after a while, if it doesn't get drunk, it turns brown even though it's perfectly esculine. So they actually have solved this problem so far, you may have noticed this, by having bottles of that sort encapsulated from top to bottom completely by a label so you can't see the color of the juice until you pour it out into a glass. And some company is looking for a deeper problem, a solution to that. So if you have a solution, you offer it up to them. If they like it, they give you $20,000. And in exchange, you give them all right title and interest to that solution. You do not publish a scientific paper that says at last, you know, no bell committee, take note, brownie and juice has been solved. Instead, it just gets solved in the background and under the terms you may not even be able to say that you worked on and successfully completed this project. Over in JetBlue, they made an amazing discovery of how to make their customer service, reps work a little harder without having to pay them more. They sent them home and had them do their job from their home and issued them these JetBlue slippers, which you cannot buy online except on eBay from former JetBlue employees who'd been issued them, which I think like mattresses, it's not clear there should be a second hand market for these things. But anyway, the CEO of JetBlue was wildly enthusiastic and pleasantly surprised when he saw the productivity increases from people being able to sit at home and work in their flying slippers rather than have to report to the boiler room. This establishes a niche in the pyramid for a generalized service of this sort. So for example, LiveOps is your contact center in the cloud. The story LiveOps tells us that in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans, the American Red Cross advertised a toll-free number to call if you needed help or had questions in or out of the city. The Red Cross agents were overwhelmed by calls. What did they do? They called LiveOps, which within 45 minutes had 10,000 extra people answering phones, hello, Red Cross, may I help you? Where were they? Not in a boiler room waiting for a hurricane. They were in slippers at their homes as LiveOps contractors who had earlier signed up to become a LiveOps contractor by running a gauntlet of automated tests. About 3,000 people a week start this gauntlet of tests and they get winnowed down, kind of like taking the SAT. Is it the SAT? We were talking about this last night. It's adaptive. It asks you, or it's GRE is adaptive. It asks you different questions depending on your answers and my idea, feature improvement, was a list of graduate schools on the right and they vanish as you answer questions wrong. It's like, you know, damn, that cost me Michigan. So you do one of those tests here and so for example here you're supposed to read the script out loud as many times as you like before calling in and you're recording. Good, it's not the honor system. You can read it out loud. Then you call and you make this recording about the mini oven and what you can get with it. You do your voice audition and they evaluate it and they give you reading comprehension questions and they test your network connection. They figure out if you know how to use your headset. Out of the 3,000 people who apply each week about 30 fall out the other side exhausted ready to become live ops employees. I'm sorry, contractors. Very important distinction in the doctrine an employee is somebody to whom you might owe health care benefits and withhold taxes and have respondent superior so when your employee screws up you have screwed up as a company because a firm can only act but through people who are its employees. Contractors on the other hand, I don't know why he put the drill in that part of the wall. Not my fault, he's a contractor. So live ops contractors then get hired and here's the bid for them calling all mompreneurs. You too can live in this hut of work at your house with your diet coke and your screens and off here is a baby in a bassinet and you get started on live ops and step one is taking orders for Armando's pizza, wherever that is. You get the script, you get the menu, hello Armando's pizza, how nice. You type it in, you hit send. It goes to Armando's pizza wherever it is and if you do that enough and earn enough cred successfully being an agent you level up and at some point you log into live ops and now there's a new option on the screen. You can take drive through orders at Burger King somewhere. So you plug in and they actually take the squawk box at the drive through route and they wire it up to your computer. So you hear the car drive up and you're like, you know, and they say can I have a whopper and you say would you like fries with that and you can say it was such a lawn because the friolator is not overflowing for you. So you get to upsell them, you take the order there, like that was the nicest incomprehensible squawk box I've ever interacted with. Your order goes back to that restaurant 3,000 miles away and they pick up the fries and for the people inside the restaurant at last the last vestige of human contact that has been inconveniencing them has been removed and they can just assemble the things as little tickets and spit out telling them oh whopper fries here handed out this window where a disembodied other hand will grasp it and take it from you. So all sorts of applications here for a generically flexible workforce that can be applied to almost anything that requires a little bit of intelligence on a task. Moving on down the pyramid we have something like SamaSource digital work for the next billion. The idea behind SamaSource when it was founded was there are people in refugee camps they maybe have Nokia phones of the old variety but those phones still have a screen something can be displayed buttons can be pressed can we think of tasks anywhere in the world for which the people in the camps could make progress on them for money by looking at those screens where the task is given and pushing numbers in response. Later it became hey let's set up a computer cluster a computer lab in the middle of the camp and they can come in and do some work. What does that work look like? For a good example of micro work we turn closer to home to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. That's 2011 things are changing quickly how many people have heard of Mechanical Turk? More than half more than two thirds I'd say haven't heard of Mechanical Turk. Just a few left this is an unusual group if you were to ask even a bunch of CIOs chief information officers gathered for their chief information officer conference like near a golf course and ask them how many have heard of Mechanical Turk almost no one. So I will make the explanation extremely quick. The idea behind Mechanical Turk is it's the 21st century and yet we don't have jet packs and yet we don't have Hal 1000 the crazed AI but it's really smart. Where is AI? AI just isn't good enough yet. So how about we have people play the part of the AI at just the right moment so that AI otherwise acts like a computer but can feel like AI to the person using it. We call it artificial artificial intelligence. Pretty interesting idea. Where does the name come from? The name comes after the famed Mechanical Turk of Yor. We're talking 18th century in the courts of Europe this thing wheeled around the automaton that played a really mean game of chess. How did it do it? Kings and princes totally befuddled. I've never seen this before. How did it do it? You've probably already guessed. There's a little person crammed in to the Mechanical Turk in order to actually play chess which just if you pause for a moment it makes you wonder. Amazon is starting a new service. What will be the controlling metaphor for its ideal functioning? If everything goes swimmingly this is what we are inventing. It's just rather a weird connection to the world's I think first digital sweatshop. So alright. Putting aside the metaphor here's a sample Mechanical Turk task provide related keywords for these images. You're here and you can't help yourself. You're like box, box, yes. You just earned a penny on your human intelligence task. And then the next one comes up. Trucks, trucks, yes. Here's another penny. You're like I like the odds on this slot machine. And you can sit there and label images all day long. They run lots of studies of demographics of Turkers and at least in the early days a large number of them weighed disproportionately were graduate students which either reflects how poorly students are paid when they're in the sciences or perhaps it's just some of the only positive feedback you get over a multi-year period which is a terrible indictment of our educational system. But in the meantime we thought it actually might be useful while we continue this talk to charter a task on Mechanical Turk and see how well it works. So I have staked $50 of my own money for a task that Steven is about to describe. A request that people do is visit an instance of the question tool I've set up. People meaning Turkers. Turkers, not our people. You can see it. It's called I-Turk. It'll be right below the I-Wall. And they have to go post a question or a response and then when they're done copy and paste the text they have into the Mechanical Turk box for quote-unquote verification. And what's the question? It's just a post-age generic question about the internet or answer somebody else's question. Post a generic question. Generic sounds like... I mean it's post a question. Not generic, just post a question about the internet. Let's come up with an adjective. For our 50 cents, damn it, they owe us an adjective. What kind of question do we want from them? Unusual question? Interesting question? Ridiculous question? That's courting trouble. A what? A generative question. That's going to result in weird things. How about something, without identifying yourself, post a question that you have personally based on something you have personally experienced or been touched by. I want to elicit stories rather than having them Google internet question take the result, highlight and paste. Although it would be interesting to see the same question that is the top hit for that put in as the questions from all the Turkers. They can be very literalistic, which is both a problem and a benefit depending on what you want them to do. Does that make sense? Something that asks for a story of some kind from them and I guess we have to tell them it need not be any more than X words. I don't know, 100 words, 200 words? But feel free to go on longer. Alright, we're going to let you guys hit that in and we will then revisit to see what comes out as we do it. In the meantime, that's not a usual question unless it's coming from Aaron Shaw and social scientists using mechanical Turk to elicit, you know, ethnographies of the internet or something like that. But rather, here's another one. What's the difference between vanilla and French vanilla? Your answer must be between 50 and 60 words long. It can't be copied from anywhere. Just answer the question. You're like, well, who wants to know? I don't know. Why do they want to know? I don't know. I guess I'm mildly curious myself now. But three cents to just answer the damn question and move on. In the kind of academic slash performance art category I believe this is Aaron Koblin's work. A guy went about paying 50 cents which is a lot in Amazon Mechanical Turk land to people to write on a piece of paper why they do mechanical Turk, take a picture of themselves and send it in and she could then make this honeycomb of people with their reasons. I take Turk for making money in my leisure time. I Turk for Christmas. I Turk to battle insomnia. I totally believe him. I Turk for drug money, just kidding. I don't believe him. And this is really interesting because it shows you the whole point of mechanical Turk is for you to never see these faces. In fact, you're not supposed to find out who a Turk or is because it's a computer, a chip is a chip is a chip. These minds are fungible is the idea. And here he was able to show you that when you zoom in enough, what's inside is people. Which leads to another project down the street at MIT called Soylent, a word processor with a crowd inside. Now again, generationally, how many people know what Soylent is? Only about half of the room. And it comes from the famed movie Soylent Green. As you can see, a musical comedy in which Charlton Heston is a hard-boiled detective studying this food product that everybody loves in this dystopian society called Soylent Green. It's a delicious little square, kind of like a small pop tart. And towards the end of the movie he makes a somewhat astonishing discovery of how you a spoiler alert. If you haven't yet watched Soylent Green you're planning on it, avert your eyes and cover your ears because very depressed Charlton Heston when he figures this out and he says you have to tell them Soylent Green is people. And off he goes to make his last contribution to society. So another kind of bizarre metaphor transformed into Soylent, a word processor made out of people. So the idea is in Microsoft Word 2010 let's have an add-in for which one of the add-ins is Soylent and it's a button called Shorten. You highlight a paragraph, you click the Shorten button and while you wait over the course of about two minutes the paragraph will intelligently, dare I say magically, shorten it self. How many times have you been just on deadline? Think about it, you're in an internet connected exam but you've written there all your words but you still remain 200 lousy words over the word limit and you've been making contractions where you can getting rid of transitive verbs, turning the answer into something that no longer flows as an English sentence and you're like wait a minute why don't I highlight and just press this Soylent button because in fact you don't even need to know what happens underneath. You don't know anything about Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is a wholesale phenomenon for which software makers can tap it for raw human intelligence is almost an uncountable. I need some intelligence please, go tap it and then offer it back at any juncture in a piece of software. It's just another resource for the software tap. Hold on, we have a question and a question too. Alright, we have a winner. Sorry. It's pretty good because you need a human to ding to do the dinging for the five words. So you dang. Well I think maybe. Kendra. I didn't actually want to say ding, but ding. We have a question and a question tool. In the context of high unemployment, mine's for sale type employment is not captured in employment statistics, neither in GDP, problem? Well, it's a problem at a couple levels. One problem is darn it our numbers are not sufficiently high for GDP which calls to mind Vice President Cheney's ill-received but I think accurate claim. You don't look at eBay. Remember they were telling him the economy was bad. He was like, but eBay, eBay, there's barter going on. Which we're not taxing though we probably should. And the barter represents GDP. GDP also a very weird phenomenon because you measure wealth by transfers of stuff among people which means that if we were to suddenly discover literally free energy. Well, microwave energy from the skies, no more oil needed, world GDP would completely plummet because you would no longer need to be buying that which could be freely given. Very strange sort of thing. I don't know if that's the problem that the asker meant that our GDP is not properly reflecting this as it gets more or is there another problem the questioner had in mind? The questioner's name Matt somewhere. Matt? Is it Matt Noyes? Yes. Matt Noyes. I was really trying to test the question tool. Way to walk back from your question. You were like, I had no idea others would find it interesting. No, it is an important question that if new models of employment grow and extend and as they're hired as contractors that's not considered employment. And so you're going to end up with a context where people are claiming unemployment when they're busy working as mechanical workers. So it's not about the statistics overall we'll have the wrong number. It's that people will say they are unemployed when in fact they're going home and under the table working on something like live ops. Exactly. And so really this question is such new economies of a large enough scale that this matters. Which actually maps nicely to the eBay problem too. It's the same thing. And I think one answer might be that we look to intermediaries. We have learned that trying to regulate the person at a distance very difficult even if you're going to try to penalize them for not say reporting that they are on live ops or on mechanical turk. Very difficult. Just like if you get something from Amazon in Massachusetts 99% of the time you are not paying sales tax for complicated reasons having to do with a 1992 Supreme Court decision called Quill that basically says Amazon is on not having any physical presence in Massachusetts just lobbing lots of shit in through UPS. Sorry, stuff in through UPS. They don't exist in Massachusetts and they therefore can't be compelled as a matter of jurisdiction. They can't be compelled to collect sales tax on the sale. So you get stuff at a discount and how is that supposed to be fair to Massachusetts vendors? Most of the answer is it's not but you are supposed to pay a corresponding use tax. We are each supposed to pay use tax on the stuff we buy for which we have not paid sales tax to Massachusetts. How many people have filled out their use tax checks within the past year? You did it once. It was a disaster. You actually paid money to the government and you were just trying to be a good doobie, Dave? Microphone. They had an indemnification if you paid it. You pay it on your income tax form. Yes. They ended up sending it back to me as an overpayment and then charged me interest for not having paid it. And it took three months and 12 phone calls to straighten it out. I didn't do it after that. But the original reason you did it was you said for the indemnity. You were afraid of getting chased for it with an audit or something. Yes. Even though that does not appear to have happened to a human in the history of Dream County. I'm not making this up. They order a lot of dental supplies from other places and they have DDS after their names. It's a big target painter on them. So you audit the dentist and you're like, have you been paying your use tax and you get into business inputs and all sorts of stuff. Ken? I hadn't audit. So they put a guy in my office for two weeks to see if he could find enough. How did you win that lottery to get a use tax audit? He basically was a super sweet guy and he just hung out at Starbucks. A couple of weeks in at the end he gave me a bill for 200 bucks and he said I found this much. That was it. This is why America is in decline. Amazing. Last point on this rather odd tangent that Matt didn't even intend. Mike? California is going through the same thing. Amazon was fighting with the state on whether it should charge sales tax on its purchases. The state is saying that you have affiliates here. So Amazon just blank shut down all of its affiliates in California. Yeah, remember there's the affiliates program. Some of you may be affiliates where if you provide a link to a page for anything on Amazon that someone clicks on, then you get a cut. I think 10% or up to 15% of if it's a book or not. And so they say that's like having a brush salesman going door to door. That's a physical presence. And then they're like well then buh-bye to all our affiliates. Jordy? I believe that Amazon and California settled yesterday and they're going to start paying charging tax next year. Wow. There are 49 other states and jurisdictions that are going to be paying close attention to that. We'll see if they can be as persistent. 48 because they already do it in New York. They already do it in New York, because New York actually did the same maneuver trying to call the affiliates brush salesman. Yochai? I want to make sure we don't derail you too much for a fascinating presentation. To not lose Matt's point in the tax discussion. You've gone essentially both ways in this presentation. Sometimes calling it sweatshop. Sometimes identifying some sources of potential source of income and this question of employment. I think it's actually quite critical to see whether we think of it as an entrepreneurial opportunity for people who really are contractors working in seven different frameworks or not and what the implications are in terms of minimum wages in terms of regulation of the terms is an amazing question. It's a deep question. It's one for which I do not have a satisfactory answer which to me is why it's worth writing a book over. I hope to have one by the time the book is done. I'm interested in people's views on that. What I will offer here as I get back to the presentation are some threads, some instincts, some things that have me I think the pluses of it are often self-evident. The ways in which having somebody freely engage in a pursuit whether for money or not that he or she enjoys that is a presumption of life is good. We don't need to offer a justification for that. They're just actualizing themselves. What I will start offering shortly are some threads that make me worry about it organized roughly in two categories. One are worries having to do with the worker if you can call them a worker with the person whose knowledge or activity is being appropriated such a harsh word is being made use of sometimes for money sometimes not and do we care about that person in a way that we would be paternalistic about them in a regulatory fashion. The other category is what it might mean for society. That person is happily working away it's just society may say we don't want that to happen and I'm going to give a couple examples of that and then we only leave hanging an answer to Matt's question an enforcement question. How would you stop it if you chose to say it wasn't fair you didn't like it they owe their tax and there we have gotten to the tax zone by saying use tax not a good way to do it and that's where I go back to the intermediary. Could you go to Mechanical Turk and say we need rosters of people that has to be a real names policy like there is for your reviews we need rosters of turkers we need hours worked and then we are going to assess you Amazon some task maybe we don't even need to know their names we're just going to assert their tax on your transactions in order to make up for the income tax we're not collecting because they're not declaring it. That might be a way to do it so long as Turk is within reach. I don't know what Britain might have to say about all the British people using Mechanical Turk and they can't get to Amazon as a matter of jurisdiction in order to do the maneuver I just said. But also keep thinking about this because what's going to happen when the first law firm is working on an annual report for a client like Enron's Q4 annual report and it's just too long and some associate finds on the web this magic shorten button installs it and uses it and now something during a quiet period goes out to not just one how does this get shortened this gets shortened by about 20 people working simultaneously but at arms length from one another one it's kind of like the three fates one identifies the sentence to be cut the other measures out how to do the sentence and the third snips on either end and the three faceless fates have made a decision about that sentence and it goes through. By the way two minutes for a paragraph how long does it take for ten paragraphs? Two minutes because you could just break any number of paragraphs into paragraphs and send them out to an unlimited number of Mechanical Turkers waiting to shorten paragraphs so you could shorten an entire book in two minutes using this tool so there are companies springing up that are trying to at least deal with the problem that might come of exposing personal information by having it sent outside the firm to random Turkers excuse me that was a sympathy cop with whoever was coughing there they have taken if you're scanning a handwritten form into typing they have managed to disaggregate the form so that they will send Robert to one person to type in to another person to type in etc etc and that makes that information less sensitive when there's only chunks and nobody knows what the chunk actually applies to that's a company called Microwork and they have an interesting thing on their website they say that in the future computer games will play an important role in the distributed work industry Microwork will be seamlessly integrated into online games instead of getting out a credit card to pay for a virtual cow for example players of Farmfield who could perform tiny game likes tasks and they won't even feel like work at all so you're playing a game and the fun for you is the game but while you're doing the game you are helping somebody else out this gets back to motivations people like playing games this is a real world virtualized game called chore wars where as you do your chores in the real world you earn experience points so here's a chore warrior he's 13 gold and a food ration for cooking dinner a somewhat gelatinous tofu cube stir fry and that makes people want to do more chores because they kind of level up they fill their passport they get their boxes checked even Google news just introduced badges for reasons that baffled the technorati but like if you start looking at a lot of stories about basketball you earn a basketball badge and then you can earn the superbasket stories about basketball it's like chill they're just badges but people like their badges and how do we know they like their badges once you have 150 million users as farmville does you start doing A B testing instead of trying to be lamarckian about the evolution of the game I'll bet they'd really like it if there were a lamb involved a little lamb instead you go Darwinian cycle through all known mammalian creatures see what result among the subset of 150 million users gives you the greatest hit just like the A B test we saw in the graph from Aaron Shaw yesterday of here's how people that care about badges edit here's how people that don't edit hmm what if they were to get a couple extra badges the ones who care how much dopamine can we get that kind of thing would be that was descriptive but you could see doing the experiment so Zynga does A B testing to figure out this is when you first sign up for farmville you have a mission your mission is to reunite this terrified crying little lamb with its broken hearted mother and it has to navigate several obstacles now it turns out this is a metaphor you can't move the lamb around you start farming when you provide your email the lamb moves to here when you go ahead and like farmville on Facebook you get around the steel wool then if you play three days in a row you cross the stream and if you get five friends to help you get around the rock and the lamb is reunited and there are people for whom it's like I just want to have the lambs be happy and then you A B it on how large the tear should be here and it results in a weird form of AI making these games extremely compelling now having a compelling game is a hard thing to argue about although game designers hate farmville and Facebook for reasons we won't go into but you start seeing then ways in which you're not just getting people to play the game you are eliciting work from them so the brilliant computer scientist Louise von An at Carnegie Mellon in 2006 came up with a way of doing the image labeling task for which Mechanical Turk was paying a penny and who was really paying that penny the likes of Google who have a bunch of images from the web that they want to label so that when you type in on image search car lots of cars appear you need a human for that generally so he invents the ESP game it's a game you can play this is not actually a question for Jay-Z which is why I was hesitating but the question is does fair use cover taking the Ken Burns Civil War music and if anybody else wants to weigh in so for our purposes the answer is yes clearly a fair use and I think institutions like Harvard Law School or like Harvard University are paid up with ASCAP just in case there should be a party on the quad where you have what's his name hold up a boom box and play say anything and you know otherwise ASCAP would come around to be like UOS performance licenses another possible job ASCAP auditor walk into bars measure the size of the speakers in the screens because as we all know under the Fairness and Music Licensing Act of 1998 any bar or restaurant of no more than 3,750 square feet not including a parking lot so long as a parking lot is used for parking purposes exclusively may have no more than six speakers four in any one room and two outdoors with which to play the radio and if they meet all those qualifications they get to play the radio for free without owing licensing break those restrictions and they owe licensing fees hard fought battle between ASCAP and the NRA on that the National Restaurant Association but we truly digress at this point so okay here's how you play the ESP game you see a picture somebody else on the internet that you will never know that you don't know and you never will sees the picture and you start madly guessing what they're typing has this kind of Bayesian truth serum thing it's not what do I think it is it's what do I think they think it is and when you both agree on what gets seen in the picture you earn points and the points this is the version from 2006 start to fill up this thermometer from the wrong side and you get points people really like points what are the points good for? nothing absolutely nothing but people like their points ding sorry alright so Lauren asked the successiveness of money prizes and attracting entries may come in part from the lure of prestige and recognition or love of winning how to separate these non-commercial motives from the profit motives does one need to separate them for what purpose would one separate them I guess if you're wanting to tax something you can't tax prestige but you can't tax money so maybe as a policy maker you'd be interested in separating them but so long as they're working I guess if you're the business you might want to separate them so you know what you can get away with offering them prestige who here is a Yelp elite any Yelp elites among us nobody wants to admit it anybody a trip advisor elite no we're just a bunch of leeches in this room we read the reviews well you can earn Yelp elite status and I have talked to Yelp eliters and like they are conflicted because at one point they sought that status and on the other point they're just they're not sure they should be that happy about it so very complex dynamics at work there yes also there's another question that just hit five votes which is anonymous what about gold farmers for games like World of Warcraft in China same species of work as Mechanical Turk or something totally different good question there's an amazing article about gold farming in China I think by Julian DeBell and the most amazing thing about this article is it has sweatshop like qualities they go to a physical location they don't work from home they go to this physical location and they farm gold all day now by farming gold we mean they have a little character that's an avatar that farms this is something AI could do in fact in the early days of this they created little AIs to go farm gold and then sell it to gamers who didn't want to bother to farm the gold the game decreed that to be illegal and then had to figure out how to enforce it how can you tell a person from a bot how they did it they had sheriffs go into the game walk up to somebody farming and be like how's it going and if the robot was just like farm farm farm farm problem and then so you'd have to sit there all day farm the gold when somebody comes up like how's it going you're like it's going very well why thank you who won the 1969 World Series may I ask you sheriff and the most amazing thing though was for the people who farm the gold or level up other people's characters so that you can for Christmas give your kid a level 50 thing that he didn't have to earn those people play leveling up the characters then giving the password back to whoever paid them and on their breaks they play the game and so it was just a sort of weird purgatory world so I don't know how to think about it but there's some great articles on this subject so alright your earning points by doing this Louise has an amazing surprise he finds that he was able to generate 4.1 million labels with 23,000 players many of whom play for over 20 hours a week earning points good for nothing in fact so many of the people earning points were coming from addresses ending in .edu that his advisor made him put a 20 hour a week cap on those IP addresses with a message it says get back to work on your thesis for those a way of giving America a leg up over .ac.uk so that's an incredible observation and you start to see people just they can get entranced this was a piece of performance art that surprised its maker it's a game called Waiting for Godot and you can play the Waiting for Godot game it turns out not to have as much action as you might want Waiting for Godot has 99 levels I don't want to spoil the ending for you they're all like this hundreds and hundreds of people have played Waiting for Godot down to the 99th level so there's some sense of curiosity as you're going there's got to be a payoff there's got to be a payoff I can't wait it's reminiscent of this is going to date me the monster at the end of this book does anybody remember that from Sesame Street and Grover the monster at the end of this and he's terrified about what finding out what the monster at the end of the book is going to be and he's trying to keep you the kid from turning the pages well there's a real surprise and you find out who the monster at the end of the book is that I will not spoil it's just too touching okay so he finds that 5,000 people playing simultaneously could label all images on Google in 30 days and individual games in Yahoo and MSN that none of us has ever heard of easily average over 5,000 players at a time Google takes note of this and Google licenses the ESP game from Luis Luis in the meantime starts a side business called GWAP Games with a Purpose and any entity that needs a little bit of human intelligence like Pandora wanting to label tunes with tags but not have to pay for it on Turk they create a game you're listening to this music is it the same or different as some other person you'll never meet and they're listening live too and you start typing keywords and they start typing keywords and then one of you says yes this sounds like it's not the same it's different you earn 60 points notice that the thermometer is now three dimensional and most points today JC with 36,000 points people love points alright way to get a lot of work done without having to pay anybody now we get to a game that really tests my claims about the structure of the pyramid because this is a game that anybody can play and if you win this game you will have solved a problem that neither the game nor its makers knew how to solve the problem is electronic design automation EDA it's a category of problem like how do we cram more transistors onto a chip ever tighter one way to do it in designing that next chip is to have a computer try to do it so each computer designs it's more intelligent successor until you have Skynet but that turns out to be hard to do because there are so many different ways to wire the chip computers are like I don't know why not just stamp out what you have you've got blackjack enough is enough they have found a way to map each possible way of positioning the transistor to a game a game where you the human click on these rectangles and change them different colors and as you click on them it changes the balls in the middle to different colors and as those balls are changing colors it's representing different states of the chip and there is some state that if you can click in the right way and get all of these balls to be green it means that you will have found a way to make the chip tighter something of great value to the chip maker and of great value to you because you win points so here's hypothetical number one it's a Saturday morning your little brother or sister or your kid is happily off the streets on a rainy day in the room not getting exposed to dangerous strangers on Facebook instead he or she is on the PBS Kids site where he's been offered one of four delicious games to play suppose this is game number four and your little friend sibling daughter is clicking on boxes because it turns out that the enough human intuition as you start clicking gets you to solve the problem people can get good at this even though they can't explain how they are good at it now I'm just curious I'm gonna call for a hum in about five seconds I want you to hum if this is something about which you have a problem there's something that bothers you about it one, two, three tentative, weak, hum if this is kind of just fine like what's the big deal let me hear a hum one, two, three alright so we have the just finers far outnumbering the people who have a problem given our timing I'm not gonna stop now in cold call people on why they do or don't have a problem instead I'm just gonna bookmark this and ask you to hold the thought and hold the hum that you gave an answer while I lay out a couple more concerns here's one back to inoscentive this is the browning and juice platform but here's another task they are seeking pyrazolopyridinal diazonines they really want them I don't know what pyrazolopyridinal diazonines do it took me about a week to learn how to pronounce it but you don't have to watch that many episodes of 24 to hypothesize what they could do or be used for for which, hooray we now have an anonymous arms length perfectly oiled marketplace that pairs together here to for unreachable buyers and sellers of dangerous chemicals right can you think of perhaps I don't know if I will be struck by lightning if I say this in the well of Harvard Law School's Austin North there are sometimes markets that are too efficient nothing happened yokai was defending me there are sometimes markets that are too efficient and then we have to ask well jeez how are we gonna regulate some mom and pop pyrazolopyridinal diazonine maker really are we going down this path is this like 419 on craigslist all over again that's a question we'll have to answer but even broader this is Rick Perry from Texas he's been governor there a long time in 2006 he set up webcams along the border with Mexico and asked people on the internet to watch them in case anything happened thousands and thousands of people watched the webcams and they had a button they could click that says I see problems today it's still up and running actually and you can go to this website and see all of the cameras in different and it tells you if you see persons on foot in this area carrying backpacks or bundles please report this activity and then you report and they record and they send out the patrol if enough reports come in and now you have patriots watching the border augmenting the thin resources of the police to look for undocumented immigrants but why not generalize this to a platform this is basically the fuzzy slippers for one particular thing like jet blue why not generalize it to this internet eyes this is a UK firm that seeks to take the highest number of closed circuit television cameras per capita in the world that currently are in private hands they're watching a shop or they're on a corner and recording just to tape so if something goes wrong you can watch the tape later why not make that be live and have the unlimited number of people sitting on couches with nothing to do stare at your camera this is what I really love it's such a British understatement earn reward money, have a chance at reducing crime potentially become a hero and save lives the British just haven't mastered American puffery yet this is actually version 1.0 of the site here's version 2.0 she's off the couch with corpus image, I've seen it on billboards advertising other things she's on the laptop looking here they are ready to respond and this is what I really love viewers register for free with no recurring fees it costs you nothing to watch other people's cameras tell me more you'll have five alerts allocated to their account the number of free alerts are limited to prevent system abuse what happens when you hit an alert on a camera it actually makes the mobile phone the person with the camera get a text message that says somebody just saw somebody in row 5 lift a Snickers bar and then at the front of the shop the person can be like hey you just lifted a Snickers bar and the system pays for itself especially because it only pays them bounties when they actually catch somebody otherwise it's a free work force and there are people who put up a honeycomb of maybe two dozen cameras like a bingo card waiting for something to hit in any of the windows and if things get a little too slow you do what you do with the TSA you put a fake gun in just to see if they're awake right I've seen that robbery before okay robbery on 17 and then you collect your bounty and the bounty tell me is this exploitation or not is it a lottery or not I don't know here is jot down license plates of every car you see extended in in real time with location if by some amazing chance one of those cars is up for repossession you win the repo man gets the car you collect a bounty in the meantime it's like having an unlimited number of scratch off tickets we're just like scratch scratch scratch scratch winner with a repo car and they'll be like I heard once somebody won on this I'm just gonna keep going my ship will come in his car will depart soon other bounty systems this from 2006 so it's version 1.0 at the University of Colorado on April 19th does this date mean anything to anybody no April 20th yeah sorry I was thinking the Nigerian scams April 20th what does April 20th mean it's weed day and it's Hitler's birthday so in a bizarre combination of memorial observance and celebration people come together on April 20th to have the great smoke out on far on field at the University of Colorado and they say to the police come on guys you can't arrest us all and the police say you're right but we can take pictures of you all put it up on the web $50 to the first person who can tell us who this person is and then we know how to arrest her now this is probably the FBI's least most wanted but that kind of tradition goes back for hundreds of years here at least decades and decades but then you start to see it's coming into its own so for example after the Vancouver riots caused by a sports loss but they seemed happy while they rioted it's very puzzling here's a guy like a totally nice guy he seems kind of nice setting someone else's shirt on fire and attempt to blow up a police car so somebody else set up a website and says like do you know who this is if you do click the button and tell us and we'll see to it that he loses as happened his lacrosse scholarship I mean it couldn't be more inventive he lost his lacrosse scholarship and here's another guy talk about getting caught in the act the newspaper box is in motion going against the car you see him cheering it on as he pushes it matched up by anonymous people to his Facebook profile so like you can go you can go friend him right now share some good times look in his album of that week and tag the photos LOL it's like amazing how much having the crowd out there can make a difference and then you start to see the government of Iran catches on to this so after election related unrest in Iran here comes the website here are a bunch of protesters we can't identify please tell us if you know who any of them are now this is going to have a natural limit because the people most likely to know who they are are the people least likely to turn them in because we know what's going to happen this isn't just vandalism or smoking weed so hypothetical question how if I'm the government of Iran and I've got money but not much else how can I identify these people well what if we made a mechanical Turk task we take from the 72 million national ID card photos we have we take the photos from each one and we set up a bunch of tasks is the person on the left any of the people on the right and we can have people in Beijing in Bangalore in Wichita just doing cranking through them like they would identifying the trucks or telling the difference between vanilla and French vanilla at prevailing mechanical Turk rates you do the spreadsheet it turns out about $16,000 will identify any arbitrary unknown person in a photo amidst 72 million possibilities and I think there's something different there outsourcing isn't new I suppose you could put it in a barge and send it off to India or the Philippines and have them sift through it but the idea that well I don't know just imagine it's a Saturday morning your kid is happily occupied playing the concentration game at the count of three hum if you have a problem with that one, two, three oh you didn't even wait at the count of three hum if you don't have a problem with that one, two, three oh there's one hum where are you hardcore libertarian will you step forward there goes the hand yes ma'am why not does it not only bother you but are you deeply puzzled why you appear to be the only person not bothered yeah some of it might be social norm pressure there's a silent majority of people supporting you saying yeah because it must be that it reflects your view that the impact of what you do or the kid does is not morally reflected upon the kid guns don't kill people bullets kill people no neither guns nor bullets kill people people squeezing triggers on guns kill people now this was my attempt to turn the dial on the hypothetical to eleven to try to bring everybody on board and then we could work through which pieces of the hypothetical are fair unfair, plausible, unplausible so of course now I'm trying to figure out is there anywhere I can turn the dial I guess I might have to turn to Stanley Milgram or something how about if your kid were offered twenty bucks to take out the legs of the kid next door what's that you're not okay with that good alright we've established then of course we would do if we had the time the doctrinal game of trying to sort out is it because he's physically wielding it is the ignorance protecting him if there were a disclosure that said by the way just so you know every solution you do aims towards a more secure Iran I don't know if that would change it is it the ignorance of the kid or it's just the distance the distance between the kids act and the acts that falls what's that fair enough fair enough like a huge thanks for stepping forward to offer up a view this is what we're here to do we see to me the puzzle then is how to peel apart is it about kids kids on PBS is it about our views about Iran does it end up being like sure anything can be used for ill but why would you want to kill a platform that has so many good things too wait who said anything about killing a platform I was not about killing the platform I'm starting to think about regulating it is this a cause for regulation and in fact as I think about regulating it really every cyber law instinct I confess that I have for the past decade upended time and again on intellectual property on defamation on security generally my academic attitude has been to say lay off the intermediaries we don't want to try to control intermediaries even though they could be powerfully controlled and in turn pass that control on to their users let's have some safe harbors let's let the thing grow here I find myself much more open to regulating the platform of mechanical Turk or something now hold that thought I won't press you more on this question but I do want to ask about another set of questions which has to do sort of with you just have one role in a mosaic but it's not your job to see what the overall mosaic is which calls to mind actually the Harvard Yale game of I think it was 2004 this was in soldiers field stadium where the Harvard glee club went up and down handing out colored sheets so it would be like the North Korean games but shaggier colored sheets for people to hold up at the right moment to spell out a message to the Yaleies on the other side and when the signal was given it turns out it was the Yale glee club and not the Harvard glee club and the message that they ended up showing and there's just something weird about being such a part of something and you're so in it you have no idea what it is and feeling betrayed by that feeling like next year we're gonna get you and we start to see like review not medtalk.com on your blog this is a Turk task you must review it you can't disclose that it is a paid review doesn't have to be a good review apparently but by the way Turkers don't get paid for what they do until the commissioner of the task says they get paid so you might do a task not get paid you're like wait I did the task what are you gonna do litigate over a penny you could be earning pennies instead of litigating over a penny so built into Amazon is this I really want my task to be approved and it turns out that you then can get a lot of reviews that are good of medtalk.com but just in case that's too subtle here's one write a positive 5 out of 5 review for a product on a website use your best possible grammar right as if you own the product and are using it tell a story of why you bought it and how you're using it and mark on any other bad reviews as unhelpful on your way out wow at last we have this doctor strange love moment where one arm of the amazon octopus has discovered the other arm of the amazon octopus and they're trying to rip out the veracity of their reviews and that's when you see things are starting to get profoundly weird out there this by the way I think is for zappos they don't ask for fake reviews they take the existing reviews that are ungrammatical and therefore unpersuasive and simply have turkers fix the grammar and then send them back again unfair deceptive trade practice I don't know you be the judge but even worse it's like this this jest in who knew you could have online reviews be subverted fine we kind of knew that I guess I don't totally trust 5 stars if I'm going to buy a plasma tv on amazon but what happens when it goes into the real world so here's lobby your member of the european parliament ding and we're also running really low on time but go ahead movement on the question tool to talk about the mechanical tariff responses to the thing we posted a little way of saying we're also near time and we don't want that to get lost I wonder if I shouldn't should I just end the presentation is it I think maybe we should all right jonathan we see some time from the next session right yours all right we're going to keep going but let's check in on the mechanical turk tool is there any way to do it on this screen or we have to do it or oh go to the question tool I wonder if this is going to work um let's see oh look at that there's oxford so it's question slash what wait for some reason you know what I think we should have that music just play the whole time there we go all right I turk all right we're going to look at them together now I'm finding google chrome crashing are other people getting there my computer is not properly on the internet has anybody gotten there oh it's up on the screen what do we have from the turkers how do you spot phishing emails and are the answers coming from other turkers or from us really fascinating good moves steven so um who made the first facebook profile what is the internet sorry oh it's up on the big screen thank you how is google plus better than facebook it is not ha yeah should I mention an injury that kept me out of the workforce for a year when applying and interviewing for jobs you just did how to live in this competitive world you know what we should have asked them to also say what city they're from wouldn't have been interesting to have is all the money spent all right I hear a no but I'm willing to put up another 50 bucks if you want to do it but totally up to you why do we allow sexual predators out of prison in the united states why people prefer internet for everything can you reject the 50 cents for ones who ask irrelevant silly questions like that yeah steven you're approving the tasks right or is it on auto approved he's feeling generous that's a good point this is called an agency problem in corporations uh huh do the satellites have fallen the ocean harm ocean life what was the question we asked them again about the internet or not okay so all right we're just learning about what worries them if I could ask Jesus anything and know I'd get an answer what would I ask him anonymous you would ask him what to ask him well all right interesting any reactions to this or anything I mean we really should make it dynamic I'll finish the presentation but if you race we could do an iterative task if anybody can think in light of these answers of something that might be illuminating in some way to adapt the task for anybody you know what on our question tool this is like make sure you're in the right I am window in is mechanical Turk exploitative and I think we have to alert them there is no right or wrong answer to that question we're not looking for anything yeah does that seem fair is this going to pass IRB okay Ken Carson is a better person to ask Ken Carson is this going to pass IRB are you doing terrible things you heard it he said no wait we have indemnity was that a no it would pass IRB I don't care he said no all right Stephen if your game it's on whatever she said no right yeah whatever now said about do you feel it's exploitative and tell us where you're from and why that's going to cost us so 50 bucks 50 bucks alrighty then so back to this situation lobby your member of the European Parliament this happens all the time Larry can tell us all about it somebody sets up a website designed to take you citizen if you live in something that resembles a republic or a democracy every so often to right because that might make a representative have a view on something that will be responsive to you because they don't want to be voted out that's the way in which the lower part of the first quadrant the the upper left quadrant from yesterday response to the bottom left quadrant okay that's the basic format of lobbying so here was something interesting that happened during the healthcare battles of the summer of 2009 was it God so long ago now summer of 2009 battles American Obama healthcare plan here's one of these sort of grassroots slash astro turf groups get health reform right dot org with a corpus image of happy diverse doctors and they ask you to send this note to your senator saying that they basically shouldn't vote for healthcare reform now again totally typical this happens all the time one extra element though from get health reform right dot org they went into Farmville and they offered Farmville currency good for objects in the Farmville world if you would verifiably go in and write your real world member of Congress against healthcare reform and they got caught doing that and promise an investigation I've written several times asking what the results of the investigation were and I have not received an answer I clearly haven't paid enough I need to up it to 25 cents but they end up then able to I mean the only way to make it more perfect is if it were the Farmville like we're actually going to pay you in virtual carrots in order to oppose those vicious farm subsidies for real farmers and people appear willing to do that for the money and you start asking well what if it turns out that this phenomenon through the platforms we've been talking about could really become big so for example if I wanted to convene a protest outside I don't know Harvard Law School be better I'm not inspired on my protests these days but you can see there are platforms now where you can type in and say 25 dollars to the first 30 people that show up with in their own handwriting, lettered signs bearing the following messages shouting the following slogans bonus points if you get yourself on TV and before you know it boom you have a flash mob protest around that topic and now if you are the politician you already long ago learned to disregard email as a weather vane for anything calls to your office that still means something polling that means something each of these things you use to gauge civic sentiment now purchasable through what in effect are more efficient markets I get a raft of phone calls for all I know they've been bought on a cash and carry arms length basis there's a protest at my town hall meeting who knows if it's real or fake can you imagine the first amendment thing of okay if you really believe what you're saying you have a constitutionally protected right to be here however if you're just doing it for the money get out and I'm throwing you out I don't even know what the constitutionality of that would be probably under Buckley Viva Laob be no problem at all so you see a world where the authentic starts to give way to the market and none of us can help ourselves with it and it leads to a world that's really really different from the one we have today there's an experiment they're doing at MIT enabling real time crowd powered interfaces so this is actually a wonderfully harmless experiment but really wonderful where they take a series of photos or even a video this is a 10 second video of themselves and then they immediately farm it out to the Turkish to figure out which piece of the video makes for the most interesting picture so instead of having to sit and pose for each photo you just do a video of goofing off and then you can imagine this all being built into the camera within 30 seconds oh that's quite alright that's extremely distressed Vera your laptop is a sheep with a huge tear running down its cheek yes somebody's battery went to critical and you went it all the way to the end anyway you can start to see how the world will have little concierges and helpers at all time here helping you on a fun task of finding the best photo there helping you as you're walking down the street I'd like some people walking behind me please and you can do it and in fact you can imagine this actually came out of last year's seminar of ideas for a better internet although I'm not sure it's better this was an idea from one of our journalists as we were talking about these possibilities of an app called Crowdcam you sign up for Crowdcam when there's something newsworthy happening near you again can ping your phone can say anybody within half a mile of this event you'll get a dollar a minute to run over and hold your camera up and film it and now they've got squads of reporters ready to give them feed but why wait for something newsworthy maybe it turns out that I want to know who's going in and out of that reproductive health clinic so I just specify a generic task for people and there's actually you can go and see there's a thing called GigWalk GigWalk it turns out is this now it's not there's GigWalk you sign up for GigWalk you're just walking around and your phone goes alert there is a photo you could take that is worth 50 cents to somebody just turn to that building take the photo and keep walking hey I want to keep a house under surveillance if you're inside the house what do you see people walking by and continually taking pictures of you and you come out and you shake one by the lapels what are you doing and they say I don't know they're not paying you to talk to me no this is me actually talking to you they're like you are wasting good time and money go get paid to do something around here for all I know you can be taking a picture of me and earning money get with it guy this is what starts to get so strange and what's the end point of this as storage and networks get so cheap the end point of this this by the way is in crowd camp you can direct the things a little bit to the left a little bit to the right so you can see an entire arm like you know I'd like to teach the world to sing the entire crowd goes like that to follow the news as the news director asks them to but right all you need is a hat a hat that produces a continuous recorded live stream with audio and video of everything you perceive during the day and you're just walking around experiencing the world and it gets banked on a server somewhere and it's indexed of course through GPS to where you have been now we wait and at some point if retroactively somebody's like wait a minute who was walking through Harvard yard at noon on that day that could be the key to the entire case you can question the cloud and say among all the stored up footage who was walking through Harvard yard at that day and has something they could show us or that we could hear what's the pitch to you wearing the hat earn money living your life just film everything and wait and royalty checks will come rolling in as people out in the world make use of your footage for whatever purpose they say and now when I think about privacy when I think about intellectual property I see that the current problems we've taken up as real and pressing which indeed are real and pressing are but the tip of the iceberg of what the technology is facilitating and for which I don't know where freedom is is it the freedom to wear a hat and record as you walk around in a public place or is it the freedom to walk around in a public place and not have that indexed ready for extraction by any party ready to write a check to do it that to me is the future of Mines for Sale where literally what's for sale is your head and your hat not necessarily even what's inside we're starting to see movement towards this this is another amazing research paper from Rice University theft caught in the background of a family photo although this particular photo was not taken with a smartphone it exemplifies the opportunistic value of photos taken by others save everything and at some point we're going to catch a thief and at the time we catch a thief the people who made the software earn medals we can't imagine the world without it that's the kind of thing I see coming worry I have and this is a worry about cognitive dissonance because it actually draws from the story from yesterday people's motivations are so complicated that in the 70s before IRBs they found that if you paid somebody nothing to do something you might not get them to do it if you paid them a lot to do something that had an ideological component write an essay about why you like Barack Obama if you pay them a lot it doesn't change their attitudes about Barack Obama there's just the right amount of money that makes them write the essay but then is low enough that they tell themselves later they must have written it because they liked Barack Obama and attitudes about Barack Obama get higher called cognitive dissonance theory so this is being put to the test where there's a start-up in New York that takes these regular captchas invented by Louise Von Ann and instead of just having the type of squishy word to prove you're a human why not have to enter the following text Toyota moving forward and there's a banner ad that you are forced to put through your mind and later you're like I could really use a car I need to move forward Toyota that's what I'll do and you start to see right how do you feel the first time you get confronted with this you have to type Dr. Pepper there's nothing like a pepper in order to like I don't know see the next article on the AP feed I don't know do you feel kind of like oogie is that the academic term for it oogie it's weird but I think we'll get used to it in a heartbeat and then at some point it's like yep you can read the article you just have to type that you're like no I'm a Republican and you type it and like I'm making it sound bad but hey suppose we're talking about a developing world country and we want more vaccinations there because that's good for them and they should want more and their leaders want more vaccinations there and their leaders want more vaccinations there why not pay people on soma source to simply answer surveys about why vaccinations are so good and all about vaccinations and when they are done their attitudes will be more pro vaccination is it somehow less respectful of their autonomy to pay them to read and then answer with the quote right answers than it is to hand out a pamphlet that declares something to them I think these are very deep questions for which we have only barely struck the surface at trying to answer the federal trade commission in 2009 put out guidelines that says if you blog or tweet because you were paid to endorse something and you don't disclose we consider that an unfair or deceptive trade practice and the blogosphere and the twitter sphere were like that's ridiculous government get your boot off us how dare you tell the dirty characters this brought to you by proctor and gamble I think it's a great idea not because it's going to affect the behavior necessarily of any end user we get into the end user problem we were talking about with matt and taxes but rather because it will allow us to go after the intermediary to say to amazon wait a minute that thing for natmedtalk.com that said you cannot disclose that goes down that is an unfair deceptive trade practice we can say you must disclose and amazon might be in a position to do it how could amazon possibly screen the thousands of turk tasks that are going on isn't that a huge burden for them how are they supposed to police it how do they do it mechanical turk exactly it's turtles all the way down you have a turk task to screen turk tasks to make sure the turk tasks are good and all you need is somebody to screen the turk task to screen the turk task and then you're done that's the kind of thing that i actually see when i look at this world my first view of casey's experiment was this is so cool and by the time i'm done thinking through the worries i'm like what's inside the robot is it ticking what's it for is this for fedex are they finally going internet at fedex we're just going to do best efforts routing for your package we've left it in washington square park but we have every confidence it's going to get no and if so it's like hey i'm no sucker i'm not going to route a package for fedex without getting a little of the action or is it just a good turn for somebody all of these questions start to come to bear and the innocence of this moment will necessarily be lost now for every bad i can come up with i see a good when hurricane the hurricane sorry the earthquake hit Haiti think that a tropical storm did when the earthquake hit Haiti there was a guy named Ben Rigby who ran a site called the extraordinary which has a new name now but it's still up and running it's a micro labor site for nonprofits nonprofits put up tasks that were like mechanical Turk tasks that would help them out mailing label generation who knows what and they offer no money for it because it's the extraordinary you are as a there supposed to be doing it as a good cause and they get lots of people who do it i have been talking to Ben about the Iranian hypothetical of how to get a bunch of people to identify Iranian protesters through these micro labor platforms and he had been worried he then thought of that after the earthquake and said i'm going to build a site where people submit a photo of a missing person then everybody can sort through the disaster images and then we'll match them he got tens of thousands of hits to this site looking over several thousand photos trying to match up missing people to people who had been seen afterwards alive in the flicker Reuters photo streams and out of that he got about ten hot leads that looked like matches which hey we don't care what the denominator is that was all free work we got out of that ten hot leads and that's exactly the process for which you would be everybody would be proud to have a child doing it it's certainly a warning that says we don't want to stop these technologies in their tracks given what they can do two more slides this is one the most puzzling mechanical task I've seen for 50 cents do something kind and take a photo of it you must do something nice you take a photo you send it in you get 50 cents and the author concedes of it as kind of a kind machine people get put in through this funnel the gears process them and hearts come out the other side I really don't know what it is people who work in this field of human computing they're all extremely lurid but anyway one way of looking at this is to say that the internet has at last achieved apotheosis we have found a way to take arbitrary amounts of money and turn it into love it doesn't get any better than that the more you spend the more kindness apparates in the world the second way to look at it is the next time somebody does something kind for me are they like running around the corner to collect their money am I going to get a mechanical task that is accept a kindness from someone and thank them graciously and at some point you're like who are we are we just sim city all of us that kind of thing benjamin franklin actually had this amazing diary and one page of his diary is devoted to being reflective about his day he says he wakes up at 5 and asks the morning question what good shall I do this day then he works then he overlooks his accounts and dines then he works then the all important 4 hours worth of putting things in their places supper music or diversion then he asks the evening question what good have I done today this is a man who felt he had a lot of affordances he's like hell I'm a founding father I'm not as powerful as it gets I've got land, I've got me but that day is one where he sets his agenda he is autonomous I don't know how much the day in which at any given moment whatever you want to do will be measured against the strict opportunity cost of being able to earn money instead or having points hanging over your head that you want to do you know that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night wanting to get one more round in against the boss on that upper level you couldn't hit right or is that just me you all know how it is when on the margins you could just stick around a little later and earn a little bit more one more chapter kind of thing I see a world in which we will soon be fighting over every minute of our time and the battle is against an AB test that opportunity cost as dear as possible many of the economists among us call that freedom and I am hard pressed to disagree with them it is empowering it means somebody really can work 24-7 to benefit his or her family I also see the ways in which pick your tableau people out in the park on a Saturday to picnic people in a subway car it's one thing to have them all kind of zoned out on iPods it's another to imagine each of them according to their own level of talent within the pyramid somebody on some XPRIZE project somebody taking a call on LiveOps for some kind of order somebody else working on a mechanical Turk task utter silence in the subway car as they're each doing their thing this is a world that I would love to enter with our eyes open using the tools of social science of law, of policy to be able to give ourselves a really good account of what lies ahead and if we don't like it what to do about it John thank you so much for offering time from your session because I know we have gone madly wildly over before we take a brief break should we see what the new task yielded it doesn't look good they put a hold on your credit card? I had to actually you had $50 left of damn it Elizabeth Warren alright so we might still commission this task and in an afternoon break we can see what it yields and this is just worth one note while we're switching around to you've now gotten a glimpse of something like mechanical Turk I've tried to show and not tell about it so that you really get some feeling like to be a Turk or at least a slice of life and even thanks to our folks over here to be a requester the next line to cross which is a thin line but it has some power over us is to try it yourself pull out your credit card instead of paying $11.50 what's a movie go for these days do people go to movies anymore they just stream them but anyway it might be worth a buck or two put out a request on mechanical Turk and see what happens and the first time you do it and you see stuff happening in the world just think about that during this lecture around the world a couple dozen people drew away from what they were doing and did this because of some keys that he clacked on his keyboard that's a power that is available to you right now if you want to play around with it and I just urge you not just for this specifically for the technology piece of things cross that line try it out it's really interesting out there alright should we break for like 5, 7 minutes now what do you say we're at 11.49 on my clocks we do 10 minutes we'll start really at noon real noon real noon