reCAPTCHA is the use of CAPTCHA security to read words that optical character recognition has failed to read. You see two words rather than one. The second word is the hard one. This 2008 article by its inventors (computer-science professors) says reCAPTCHA is a way that
“wasted” human processing power can be used to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.
Self-experimentation like mine is similar. I did it in my spare (“wasted”) time. I was going to sleep anyway, I just recorded my sleep. And I found new answers to old questions, such as how to sleep better, that professional scientists had not yet found. You could say I solved problems that professional scientists aren’t yet capable of solving.
I believe that reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine are two ends of what will be a power-law distribution of the use of “spare” human processing power. reCAPTCHA: many people, tiny amount of time per contribution. Self-experimentation like mine: Tiny number of people, large amount of time per contribution. Halfway (in log units) between reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine is Wikipedia: middling number of people, middling time per contribution. Writing open-source software, to the extent that it’s unpaid, lies somewhere between Wikipedia and my self-experimentation.
Volunteer work is nothing new. Intellectual volunteer work is nothing new — most books are written essentially for free. What is new is cheap distribution of intellectual volunteer work. Which greatly increases the diversity of what can be done and the extent to which it can be cooperative.
Clay Shirky just wrote a book about this phenomenon, which he calls cognitive surplus (also the title of the book). Might be worth checking out.
All that wonderful wasted intellectual property made ReCaptcha’s inventor a millionaire 20 times over. It’s not a public benefit project, it’s a for-profit enterprise.
Kerry, you have a point. I think degree of public benefit and how much money someone makes are two separate dimensions; an enterprise can be high on both or low on both. However you are right that I was too narrow in my thinking about this. The product reviews left on amazon.com surely help Jeff Bozos and are examples of the use of spare time — maybe they lie between reCAPTCHA and Wikipedia.