How Much Work Would You Do For A Lottery Ticket?
by Bruce Swanson
bruce.swanson.california@gmail.com
(There is a version of this essay with illustrations and better formatting on Scribd.com.)
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You are at work, at play, at home, in transit. You have a second, a minute, an hour to kill.
You log onto a website where you find a list of typesetting, proofreading, copy editing, or translation projects. Each requires a specific application, such as Word or Excel. All of them are commonly available.
You choose a PDF file containing images of 100 pages of handwritten text of no interest to anyone but the owner, who is offering $100 to have it all typed by midnight.
It’s now 9 p.m. You start work.
But within a minute you are too bored to continue. Without hesitation you click the browser window closed and three hours later the full $100 is deposited to your Paypal account.
It’s not a mistake.
Some days later, reading about a recent local murder, you realize that you knew the victim and who her murderer might be. But you don’t want to risk going public with the information. And you don’t trust the police and the courts to safeguard your identity.
You log on to a secure website that allows you and the police to exchange messages securely without them ever knowing who you are. Nor can they ever know unless you tell them first. You give them your hunch.
Within a week your suspect has been arrested. A year later he is tried and convicted.
Upon that conviction you begin privately receiving online a steady stream of big-payout lottery tickets. Because you were the only one to inform the police, you’ll keep getting the tickets until one of them wins.
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Everybody, almost, can and will be willing to hazard a trifling sum for the chance of a considerable gain. — Alexander Hamilton
A keystroke, mouse-click, or touch-screen response is a trifling sum of work that everybody on the Web, almost, would be willing to hazard for the chance of a considerable gain.
In the hypothetical situation described above, you began to type out handwritten text that had been scanned into a PDF. But so did hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. Working simultaneously, many quitting just like you did as others joined in, the 100-page project was completely typed with time to spare. The funder of the lottery not only got a great deal at a page-rate of one dollar, the work was finished much faster than could have been done using conventional pay-arrangements. And the capacity to automatically count and record the total number of different keystrokes you and everyone else typed all but guaranteed a numerical keystroke-consensus per written character.
In effect, the document was proofread as it was typed.
That has never before been economically feasible, and the implications of that are what makes the keystroke-lottery concept revolutionary.
You can see why someone would fund such a lottery: programmatic redundancy is always best in data entry and proofreading. It is often good in copy editing, and might even be good in certain kinds of translations, such as non-stylistic, non-literary efforts where speed and legal intelligibility alone are paramount. Redundancy is the principle behind crowdsourcing, defined by Wikipedia as the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call.
Because the total amount of money offered ($100) was rather small as compared to conventional lotteries, during the auction (which was for a place in the site’s work-queue), the owner of the pages guaranteed a winner and specified no lower limit on the total quantity of keystrokes per person needed to win. That means to play, you needed only to type the minimum number of keystrokes sufficient to establish a context on the page, verifiable by enough others typing the same keystrokes to represent the same handwritten letter or digit. In this example, had the document started with A, then that single keystroke would have earned a chance to win the payout.
The thesis of this essay is that growing ease and universality of visual communication must and will eventually turn chance itself into compensation for certain distinct kinds of online work. That chance — to win money for minimal work—will guarantee access to a world-wide virtual crowd of Web users whose sheer numbers will free them to participate as little or as much as they want, when they want, hazarding their time and typing in the lottery associated with the project on which they have chosen to work. Group keystrokes from around the world would repeatedly wash in real time like a digital aurora over a given document, page, paragraph, sentence, or Captcha-like word-picture in play at the moment. Conventional work-schedules and commitments and piecework-schemes would be unnecessary.
A subtle but important point to be understood is that each typist would be working not specifically to be accurate, but rather to achieve consensus with others. Because only a consensus-validated keystroke could win, for the typists there would be no correct keystrokes per se, only consensus-validated ones. The document would be intently followed to achieve that consensus as quickly and easily as possible, and only documents that showed a reasonable chance for the money offered of achieving a consensus would be accepted by the crowd. Thus, keystroke lotteries could just as well be called consensus lotteries.
The need for consensus also dictates that typists will select only projects in which they have the necessary expertise. They would not be maximizing their chance of winning if they were not so selective. Thus, projects requiring a critical amount of recondite knowledge would cost more to fund because fewer typists would be interested in gambling their time on them. As with jobs like the one pictured above, documents trafficking in obscurity would have to radically increase their offered winnings to generate enough interest to provide meaningful consensus.
That point understood, gambling would quickly go to work. As in the hypothetical case above, to make more interesting a small payout for snippets of typesetting or proofreading (crap in printing-parlance), an appeal would have to be made to immediate gratification with an instant guaranteed-winner upon project completion. As is the case in traditional lotteries, larger payouts wouldn’t require a guaranteed winner per drawing. (Insurance, funded by micro-lending members of the public who prefer that form of gambling, might be offered to those needing higher payouts than they are personally willing to risk.) Crowdsourcing would mean crowdpaying, and the pay would be the lottery tickets earned when individual eyes, brains, and fingers acted in sync with a crowd changing by the second, yet remaining unchanged in its specific purpose.
As with any group working together, there would have to be a mechanism for a single typist or minority of typists to forge a new consensus in the face of the majority. That mechanism would probably be a kind of side-bet. A typist, realizing that the document contained a factual or stylistic error, might offer a correction and then flag it. That flag would attract the attention of others looking for consensus. So the dilemma for those other typists would be whether to validate the flagged change with their own keystrokes, or ignore it. They might ignore it at their peril, if newer typists logging on saw the flag and decided to back it up. Participants might even bet their earned tickets on the outcome of a flag. Typists might allow a public record of their corrections, thus lending credence to their flags. Thus would typeset-led proofreading morph into copy-editing, a mechanism that might also make group translations possible (of which, see below).
Because all this activity would be taking place in a digital environment, it might be possible to select projects that offer odds modeled on popular conventional lotteries. This would allow participants to learn the practical meaning of the odds that such lotteries offer, but without paying cash for the lesson. It might also be possible to set parameters to price participants’ typing as an hourly wage up to the amount that they would have paid for a conventional lottery ticket. The program would notify them when they reached their pre-set limit, at which point, to the keystroke, they could quit. In any case, as many chances beyond their customary daily or weekly ticket-purchases as they would earn at their keyboards, most people would still never win a significant payout — even as they watched a news-ticker roll across their monitors announcing the names of winners around the world who had.
So a keystroke lottery could be educational enough — California Lotto revenues are supposed to help education — to make conventional cash-purchases of lottery tickets unappealing to larger and larger numbers of players. More and more of them might switch to keystroke lotteries, or even — the more perceptive among them — quit lottery-gambling entirely. That said, few players have ever won lotteries, but that has always been enough to regenerate interest for a given payout. A chance for the money, as always, is the attraction. Quitters would return to the fold.
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If Wikipedia’s business-plan had first been posted online for general review, most readers probably would have accepted its theoretical potential, but not its chances for practical success. What most surely would not have predicted is the spontaneous growth and increasing complexity of Wikipedia’s participatory culture — that growing body of knowledge, experience, foresight, governance, and enforcement that have come to characterize the experience of using and maintaining it. (Wikipedia may be the first and only effective form of mass communism the world has seen thus far.)
Because gambling is (arguably) based on psychology as much as mathematics, world-wide keystroke lotteries probably couldn’t be computer-modeled to the point of foregoing all funding for further development in the manner of, say, cold fusion should any given model indicate failure. Only by trying it in real time with real people winning enough real money could its technical feasibility and potential popularity be determined. Until that happens, one sees nothing in the idea of keystroke-lotteries that would cause any reasonable person to state outright that they couldn’t work, that a culture similar to Wikipedia’s couldn’t arise.
But there is another fundamental point: Wikipedia offers no compensation because it doesn’t have to, being viscerally attractive to huge numbers of volunteers. By contrast, the website Distributed Proofreaders (for example) also offers no compensation, but isn’t remotely as popular as Wikipedia because the work it offers isn’t creative at any level and is thus fundamentally uninteresting to too many people. The prospect of proofreading a given book by keyboard may interest you personally, but without the prospect of financial reward it won’t interest the general public. This is why DP is a useful but tiny part of the Internet, its momentary slashdotting in 2002 notwithstanding. But putting a gaming front-end on equally uncreative data-entry work could put keystroke lotteries on par with Wikipedia in popularity and impact, attracting millions of disinterested strangers willing to do their best working together solely for the chance of winning a payoff. If the result efficiently lowers cost and reduces production time — in other words, if it works — who could object?
The federal government might object. It follows the laws set by Congress, so that body’s gaming-industry contributors could be expected initially to fight any lottery system not already fully described and permitted by law. More locally, there are states with lotteries and states without them. It’s possible that both would oppose a keystroke lottery, either from fear of a loss of state-lotto earnings or out of opposition to any legalized form of online gambling. In that event, the first keystroke-lotteries inevitably would move offshore. On the other hand, all interested parties might co-opt keystroke lotteries as a promising revenue-source.
Legal objections notwithstanding, keystroke-lotteries are surely well-within our technical capability. Economics are another matter: we must consider the marginal cost of each additional lottery-typist versus one staff proofreader or freelancer hired by the hour who could be counted on over time to miss more mistakes than a crowd would. That marginal cost would no doubt vary from project to project, but in general it probably would rise to a prohibitive point, reflecting the fact that once you’ve gotten the crowd to a certain size for a document of a given perceived complexity, the wisdom of that crowd would not be economically increased by adding any more people to it. But when would that additional typist would become prohibitive, and at what point would a game not need a guaranteed winner? An auction would provide the answers.
As for collusion, it would surely be uneconomical at any scale. One would have to organize a ring of typists and split the (rare) winnings with them, all the while knowing that the keystrokes of enough unorganized players would swamp the conspiracy. Also, typists might (in some lotteries anyway) be able to see what other typists are doing in real time. Software could also detect suspicious patterns and block IP addresses. Endless waves of cheaters would inexorably realize that they might just as well spend their time doing what everyone else is doing, given the tiny chance of winning. As with any lottery, tiny input, tiny chance; much larger input, very slightly larger chance. Cheating would add to the real work necessary to theoretically win, and would probably have to limit itself to the smaller-payout lotteries with fewer participants. But even then, keystroke lotteries would still be premised on the little amount of work required of any one person to participate. So protective levels of participation might be a given even in lotteries with small payouts. As a further measure, projects might be graded by a statistical measure showing the theoretical effort required to cheat it, a measure that would certainly be reflected in the project’s bidding level.
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You can get it cheap, fast, or right—but only two out of three. — anon.
Small, neighborhood convenience-stores can charge premium prices while remaining competitive with bigger-box stores located nearby. Likewise, keystroke lotteries would not necessarily be less expensive than work done conventionally. They might even be more expensive, especially before they became ubiquitous enough to induce sufficient competitive bidding among massive numbers of participants. Instead, keystroke lotteries would be a radically cheaper and faster way to deliver the highest practically attainable levels of quality for a given volume of work within a given deadline. In other words, attaining such quality on time under traditional methods would be radically more expensive than using a keystroke lottery. Understanding this distinction is critical. Initially not everyone would be willing to pay the premium for that quality as a function of time. But those who were willing would get their job done cheaper, faster, and righter than ever before. Cheaper, faster, and righter would eventually define cheap, fast, and right. The above-quoted maxim would be overturned as a consistent principle for the first time in the history of printing.
It obviously remains to be seen how quickly the public would understand exactly what a keystroke lottery isn’t. The key selling-point would have to be consensus, a requirement limiting creativity although not (as indicated above) prohibiting it entirely. Thus keystroke lotteries may not be expandable to polls and advice-giving, formats not based directly on a template. However, it might apply to certain forms of creative copy-writing, such as found on Trada.com. There, crowds of ad-writers try to write ads that merchants want written but don’t have the time or expertise to write themselves. That merchant might specify a maximum price-per-click of $1.00. A writer in the Trada crowd who can write the merchant an ad that gets clicks at below a dollar is paid the difference (minus the Trada fee). It may be that that kind of competitive writing bounded by strict space and content limitations (keywords and creative URLs) will attract people willing to write complete but short Google ads, with the money they collectively earn going into a pot that one of them would win.
Another recent try at crowdsourcing is Gigwalk.com, in which smartphone users are paid to provide local bits and pieces of mapping or pricing information too expensive to obtain conventionally. The rate starts at $3 per gig. But how much work would someone do for that three dollars? And how much work would they do if a lottery ticket for a thousand-dollar pot cost $3, funded by pooling a day’s or week’s or month’s worth of $3 gigs? To ask that question is to repeat what I initially asked at the top of this page: how much work would you do for a lottery ticket?
For perspective on the question of overall acceptance, imagine that keystroke lotteries were first in the history of lottery gambling. Then someone came along and proposed the following: instead of having people access to work-games from the convenience of their homes, offices, and cellphones, why not have them trek to the corner liquor store? And instead of having people gambling on the outcome of real work, why not have them gamble on colored images of fruit? And pay with their own cash for the privilege?
Would the general public reject keystroke-lotteries even if there was ready money available to be won merely by logging on and typing for a few seconds or minutes at a computer where they already happen to be, and are going to be, hour after hour, day after day? It doesn’t seem likely, when a single keystroke or mouse-click could (statistically speaking) win, and the wider public’s general forbearance would — to its quick realization — merely advantage a comparative handful of early-adapters.
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Translations
I have at last discovered the right way to translate Onegin. This is the fifth or sixth complete version that I have made. I am now breaking it up, banishing everything that honesty might deem verbal velvet and, in fact, welcoming the awkward turn, the fish bone of the meager truth. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940 –1971.
Nabokov believed that no honest translation could aspire to, or pretend to achieve, artistic unity with the language of the original work. Although his own novels were conventionally translated for commercial reasons, he put his philosophy rigorously into effect in his own literal translation of Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. Nabokov’s model has not caught on with the public, and today there is considerable discussion about what the future holds for professional translation-services. Even for the strictly monolingual (such as myself), it seems reasonable to suppose that a document translated by a keystroke lottery would create enough consensus on which to base a lottery while simultaneously producing significant differences (fifth or sixth complete version). But given the digital environment of a word processor, those differences could be retained as separate documents, or expressed by color coding, typefaces, or type sizes (take your pick); or abstracted statistically and displayed in charts and graphs. Degrees of consensus could be indicated by a number on a scale, and documents could have that number appended to them. All this would be an advantage where the highest degree of “accuracy” (I think Nabokov would approve of the quote marks) would be needed as quickly and/or cheaply as possible. It should be remembered that the whole point of the process is consensus and nothing else, so individual expressions of style might persist as typists realized a non-literal construction that was also likely to suggest itself to other typists, to the point of flag-betting for it or against it. Nabokov followed his own sense in deciding when to finish his book, a sense no doubt informed at least in part by the dictates of time and money. Those same dictates would govern typist-translators, albeit within a radically different format. Keystroke-lottery translations would not likely be popular as literature, but literature would not always be wanted or needed, either by the writer or the reader.
Computerized translations will continue to improve in all-around “accuracy” (quotes again), yet for documents of legal importance especially, human input will still be needed for a long time to come. I think that more and more translations via lottery will become contrary betting-games—that typists will scour documents for things to bet against, as described above.
The Question Answered
How much work would you do for a lottery ticket? Very little — at any one time. That’s the whole idea.
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Part II
Informant Lotteries
In Sicily the police worked secretly; an informant’s name is never known. But in America an informant must appear in court. And to inform is to invite swift reprisals. Consequently the already reserved and suspicious Sicilian shrugs his shoulders — “And if I knew, would I tell?” — The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929)
As described so far, keystroke lotteries and its variations would be for willing participants who would receive their own earned tickets and winnings (if any), as in any lottery. But if the keystroke-lottery model were to be successful on a large-enough scale, it might include a secondary market of participants: prisoners, parolees, and those sentenced to home-detention. They would all work in keystroke lotteries without collecting any tickets. Instead, in exchange for their labor they would receive incremental reductions in their sentences, or other credits. (The basis for eligibility to participate might even end up as a class divide among prisoners in general.)
To play those prisoner-generated tickets, anyone (prisoner or not) with information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of individuals responsible for yet-unsolved crimes, would submit that information anonymously via Internet interfaces protected by public/private-key encryption. Use of that protocol (configured especially for this purpose) would enable the police to securely communicate with their informants without requiring those informants’ personal identities. Upon a successful conviction (or some other appropriate stage of the proceedings), a successful informant would be sent, via the same encrypted interface, an agreed-upon number of lottery tickets (formatted as a string of numbers and letters) generated by prisoners. Those tickets would then be played by their new owners in whatever lottery was used to generate them in the first place. Given the digital environment involved, informants could specify the specific games they would accept tickets from, and when they would accept them, thus enabling them to change their odds of winning, exactly as if they were purchasing conventional tickets or earning them as ‘civilian’ participants in a keystroke lottery. As described in the first section, above, such a process would be inexorably educational regarding the realities of such lottery odds.
That education wouldn’t be the only advantage. A Los Angeles Times story several years ago about the role of the police in that city’s south-central district described how gang-members who had killed one young man showed up at his funeral and cheerfully partook of the feast in full view of his friends and family. Everyone knew who the uninvited guests were and what they had done, but nothing in the story indicated that the killers were ever brought to heel by the police or anyone else. Quite the contrary. The conclusion (unstated in the article of course) is that the prevention of local vigilantism is the only effective consequence of a heavy police-presence in dystopically high-crime areas. People living and working in such perversely-controlled environments are necessarily indifferent to anything except their own immediate well-being, a phenomenon well-described by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But now imagine the same funeral-feast in the presence of a keystroke-informant network, an amoral mechanism that would make community involvement with law-enforcement irresistible.
And now compare that imagined scenario with the present system. Most crimes get no bounty, and those crimes that do often still go unsolved. And there is no pricing-mechanism available to determine the value of information that could lead to conviction. Instead, that amount must be determined administratively, the main determinant being the municipal budget and the officially-perceived seriousness of the crime in question. Such a procedure is necessarily arbitrary and feedback is inefficient to nonexistent. Police learn that the amount is too low when no information is forthcoming, or the information comes in too slow to prevent further crimes by the perpetrator(s); and they know that the sum is too high when they are flooded with bogus information that also brings no suspects or convictions. And even attempting to earn the bounty by an informant means reporting your identity to the authorities, who can never be trusted to maintain secrecy. That can make possession of critical information useless, effectively reducing the bounty to zero. But an informant-lottery would perform the helpful service of empowering greed to trump fear: information would now be as valuable as it is potentially dangerous, thus making it valuable enough to warrant the easy effort of getting online and anonymously putting the information in play. The authorities might be trusted, on average, to maintain confidentiality of that play long enough to locate a named suspect before word hit the street, although it might not always be important if they didn’t: of the identity of the informant, there could be nothing directly known. That’s why public/private-key encryption is an integral part of this idea.
Valuation-psychology would necessarily change: informants would be competing against each other in cases of crimes publicly witnessed or committed by a group, some of whom would have lesser degrees of involvement. This would make possible a market-based pricing mechanism, possibly along the lines of a Dutch Auction: crimes with no other informants would command the highest price demanded: an open-ended stream of tickets that would stop only upon a successful drawing: Play Until Win crimes — a lottery-based annuity. Where any number of people had the critical information, informants would submit it along with a bid for the lowest number of tickets desired in return, possibly as little as one: Play Once crimes.
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Objection!
Informant lotteries wouldn’t work in cases where testimony is required.
True, but there would be fewer trials where testimony is required, and fewer trials at all because there would be fewer crimes in the first place.
If there is no impediment to submitting lies and hunches, then a flood of them will result. There have never been impediments. For the price of a postcard, phone-call, or email access anybody can submit information anonymously (although doing so wouldn’t win anything). The question is whether the chance of winning an informant-lottery would corrupt it to irrelevance.It’s more probable that, just as in Part I’s discussion of collusion, useful information would predominate. Even if it didn’t, tips that named too many different people, or even differed at all, would provide a useful measure of the probability of the particular crime ever being solved. It would be even more useful if the extent of the divergence were public knowledge. What wouldn’t be public knowledge is who the informants were. The slim chance of winning a lottery wouldn’t attract informants.
It certainly would attract informants, but their incentive, compared to conventional bounties, would be turned inside out. Now, community indifference, which currently forestalls action, would become a driving force. Informants would submit their information for no other reason than they might as well. It’s the flip-side of the coin of moral apathy: ask not why you should inform — ask why not? Would you neglect to pick up an unused Lotto ticket from the sidewalk?
Does the keystroke get entered immediately, or only upon submission of the entire work?
I assume that you mean the entire work of a specific player who types a few seconds or minutes and then quits the project, rather than the entire work of all the typists put together upon expiration of the job’s deadline. I think each keystroke would be entered immediately, but that the ‘player’ would have to Save or Send his keystrokes before closing the browser to register them. By Saving your keystrokes, you might leave open the possibility of coming back later and continuing, or even retyping it after researching a point. You also might want to see what the other typists are doing with that particular string of text, assuming that capability were allowed (and this might be a critical point). Note that the players are not racing against each other to win the prize. At least as I envision it, each job worked on would have a specific deadline, and no money would be awarded before its expiration. I do think this point is essentially a technical one and not fundamental to implementation of the idea, although I should add that I’m not technically educated in the computer field.
Does the work periodically get submitted; if not, how was it submitted when the user in the hypothetical story closed their browser? It would be a bit like online Chat. You type your message, and the person you are chatting with is informed that you are typing a response, but can’t see it until you Send it. The computer would be noting your ongoing participation, but would have no data for consensus purposes until you finish typing and then Send it. And of course, you could have the option of configuring your browser to automatically Send, Save, or Delete upon closing the window. Again, I think primarily a technical question.
Suppose I added some whitespace, or accidental characters in my transcription, leading to all of my letters being out of place by a few positions — how does the verification system adjust for that?
It’s important to remember that there are no “correct” keystrokes per se, just consensus-validated ones. Thus, strictly speaking, your whitespaces and accidental characters would be disqualified unless everyone else made the same ones. However, that only partially addresses your point. The greater problem of being out of sync with other typists because of a single added word space or character brings up the greater objection of how to link a given typist’s keystrokes with a specific string of text on copy. After all, lots of copy (such as legal text) is full of repetitious boilerplate. How would the computer know which section of copy you typed from? And is this important?
To answer this question, bear in mind that the whole idea of a keystroke lottery is based on massive levels of participation providing a lavish redundancy of keystrokes. This is a valid premise, because this system is, after all, a system of gambling, and people are attracted to easy ways to win money while gambling, and in a keystroke lottery a single consensus-validated keystroke makes you eligible to win the pot. That’s pretty easy work. Even if the pot were quite small, say $5 (or even less), you wouldn’t have to do much to have a chance to win it, and such low winnings would probably offer a guaranteed winner. If there was a lack of enough participation, then it would be possible to win with a consensus of one—your own keystroke(s). But the playing community isn’t going to allow that. Every last character on copy is going to be typed many times by many different players because every character they don’t copy is one less chance of winning for them and one more chance of winning for someone else.
As for the computer, it starts out with a blank slate—it is not comparing your keystrokes with the copy you are reading from. It is only comparing keystrokes from many different players. So any player could start typing at any point in the document, from the first character to any random one in the middle or at the end. Eventually, given sufficient participation, the computer(s) will find matches for that character, and (amazingly) be able to logically assemble everyone’s keystrokes together in a way that matches the original copy as perceived by the (ever changing) collective of typists. It will be able to do that because, although many people will type just small segments (perhaps especially in low-payout jobs, which may require that they be aggregated with others for payout purposes), as many people will type much longer ones, perhaps even the entire job. Those longer strings, sufficiently repeated and overlapped, will provide the chain the computer needs to assemble the smaller segments in order.
That means that you can’t just start typing letters at random, knowing that your letter a must be validated, thus earning you tickets. Certainly you could type a single highly popular letter or word or phrase and then log off, and it would inevitably be validated. However, if you (or a bot) typed a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a; or: the the the the the the, such a string is simply not going to be validated by anyone else unless it matches the copy (which, in the example above, would be possible, although rare). As for a botnet trying this approach, that could be easily spotted and blocked.
The same logic applies to any other random string of letters. The system is going to consider your entire output (for that session) as the consecutive representation of what you are reading straight from copy. Of course, you could log on to a job, type a letter a then log off, then log onto another job, type another letter a, etc. But why bother? Why not just log onto one job and start typing? This addresses a point I made in the article about collusion. You could try, but in the end you would better off spending your time just doing what everyone else is doing.
So to answer your original question, your added whitespace or accidental characters would be ineligible but the rest of your text, if consensus-validated, would be rescued.
I think this is the key to the success of my imagined lottery: you log on, just start typing anywhere, and type for as long or as little as you like. The computer-network, in combination with overlapping and linking strings provided by others, does the rest.
If the submission is literally as you press each key, what happens when you press e.g. Backspace? Does that ‘undo’ the submission of that key, or is another entry accepted?
I think this question is addressed in my second answer: the backspace key wouldn’t register. But there might programmed into the system a unique keystroke-combination to type if you did want it to register it. There may conceivably be times when a backspace could be appropriate in typing copy.
Wouldn’t it be possible to script/similarly automate something that simply deletes and retypes the same key over and over, giving vastly better odds—which could also be distributed across a bot-net for even better odds, while remaining economical?
In the system as I’ve described it, there would be no benefit to retyping the same key, nor in repeating it, nor by churning out random keystrokes or having a bot do this. Besides the fact that your keystrokes wouldn’t be validated by anyone else, you’d have to program the bot to type the letters at a human rate, not instantaneously, since the system would be programmed to look for bot-like behavior, and it could look very closely at the intervals between strokes and compare them to others churning out the same letters. Such botnet collusion would be obvious. The log-in process would be configured with Captcha-like requirements to block automated log-ins; and rigorous real-name registration would likely also be required. This would be perfectly acceptable to most people—the likelihood of having to pay taxes on huge payouts doesn’t hinder people from playing state-sponsored lotteries. (But as for Informant Lotteries and real names, read on.)
I suppose your earlier points about blocking the IP’s of suspicious clients is mitigation that could be applied, but I wonder what the relative cost of keeping such a system secure would be? Certainly it would dwarf the meager prize amount ($100 in the example story) if it needed to be resilient against DDoS attacks, for example. Someone also has to host this service to the potentially millions of clients, who will all want it to be reliable and highly available, lest they were to be unfairly robbed of their ‘lottery ticket(s)’. The server and storage costs would not be insignificant.
When you look at this idea not as a system of work but as a system of gambling, the problem of how to pay for it disappears. After all, what is the cost of installing and maintaining Lotto machines in thousands of liquor stores, gas stations, and shopping malls? What is the cost of building casinos in the middle of a desert? As people look to keystroke lotteries as a source of gambling, as they began to catch on to it, they would very likely quit those other forms that are most similar but less convenient—and which require them to actually purchase a ticket to play. Although smaller payouts would probably require a guaranteed winner, larger payouts would not. Potentially there could be routine Powerball-sized, world-wide-funded payouts. Thus, a piece of the uncollected auction-money (from games with no guaranteed winner) could be used to support the system. After all, the funders of the lottery—the information-owners—wouldn’t expect to have all that work done at no cost to themselves and (as noted above) winners of big payouts don’t expect to keep it all. The system may even require that some auction-funders surrender their entire offer upon completion of the work, especially for those backing smaller-payouts. (Here an economical question arises: for larger payouts, would the amount surrendered equal the amount that would be paid out under a conventional hourly or freelance arrangement?) The percentage subtracted from the pot as a fee would no doubt vary, based on any number of metrics. Advertising would certainly play a role in funding as well.
As for security, I don’t think this would be more difficult than providing security for online banking. However, the question of security (and cost) might have direct bearing on whether the entire system would be proprietary or peer-to-peer. I’m not qualified to address this point in detail, but I think it likely that there would initially be both kinds of systems. I suspect that informant lotteries might start peer-to-peer and stay that way, a reflection of a governmental disinclination to get involved (at least initially) in solutions of that kind, in the manner of the Bitcoin system (a point I address below.)
Consider the further technical challenges presented by translation efforts. Individual translations are likely to differ in words, rather than mere keys, meaning it would be very difficult to award a lottery entry based on a keystroke. In particular, what will the impact be on the consensus-validation logic? Even if many entries are submitted, they are likely to all differ in several places due to word-choice and other variables that are highly expected when translating (consider that even amongst the automated translation tools available, the phrasing chosen varies non-trivially). This means that each submission will be impossible to compare on a keystroke basis, since it is highly unlikely that even two submissions will contain the same set of words, in the same order.
Although I’m monolingual myself, like many people I’m aware of the problems, both literal and artistic, inherent in translations. I have to disagree that there would not be sufficient keystroke-consensus regarding certain kinds of translations. Your objection would probably apply to modernist poetry for example, but surely not for the bulk of business letters and technical papers, and perhaps even computer-program notations. As for the more problematical field of general literature, remember that the typists are going to be thinking: What is everyone else going to translate this to be? So there would doubtless be a flattening effect unpleasant to certain minds. Yet it might get the point across to many more minds, and so be useful for the price. And remember that all of the variations would be available to the auction-funder (the information-owner), who might use the variations to polish the translation as he saw fit. As for technical matter (or even for literature), as I pointed out in the article, all the differences could be made available to readers upon completion, with all kinds of measuring metrics (perhaps expressed in colors, typesizes, etc.) available for comparison.
Your question is probably only resolvable by experimentation. Backwards translations via keystroke lotteries might be a useful testing tool. But ultimately, the only real test that matters is the price such translations would require, as established by auction. Multilingual typists would decide amongst themselves, spontaneously, whether a particular document is worth spending their time on. And don’t forget my point in the article about the growth of a Wikipedia-like culture and mindset. That could result in a new kind of translator, thinking with the crowd, instead of alone, as well as a new kind of reader of translations. I suspect both would arise, and make consensus-translations practical, at least for certain kinds of subject matter.
Regarding the second idea [Informant Lotteries], I’m not sure how you would automate the analysis of the testimonies. They would have no base ‘source’ text to go from, and as such probably the only commonality between them will be keywords; notably, proper nouns (names of suspects, victims, localities etc.). Hence, it becomes difficult to weed out a ‘good’ entry as opposed to a ‘bad’ entry (there will probably be a lot of submissions with mentions of names that have appeared in media already- these will be difficult to weed out as ‘noise’, since they will all have a lot of keywords in common with each other).
I should have clarified this point in the article: informant lotteries would be a derivative function of keystroke lotteries but the two would have nothing technical in common—there would be no keystroke consensus-building at all in an informant lottery. Instead, tickets generated by prisoners and home detainees (or even volunteers) would be used as reward-currency, instead of cash, as I described it.
There is a problem though with weeding out bogus tips by criminals themselves or people just trying to game the system. (I actually addressed this point in an earlier version but inadvertently deleted it.) The solution is that informants would have to have skin in the game to participate. They would do this by working in keystroke lotteries themselves and accumulating a sufficient number of ticket-credits, just like a convict would. Criminal organizations could recruit plenty of typists, and bad information can result in conviction, but of course in general the better the incriminating information, the greater the likelihood of conviction. Another twist is that such attempts at collusion could themselves be made the subject of an informant lottery. Indeed that would probably be inevitable.
One interesting twist is that informants would be generating tickets that they could win now in order to win a chance for a winning ticket later. Informants with no ax to grind in a particular case would need incentive to make the effort. Probably the incentive would be that, upon a conviction based on an informant’s information, that informant’s ticket-stream would be based on how many tickets that person had generated, in conjunction with the seriousness of the crime and the number of competing informants, if any. The stream might match the generated tickets one-for-one for some crimes, and be a big multiple for other crimes. For example, if the information led to the capture of a suspect at large, then ten generated tickets might earn a stream of 100 tickets upon conviction. If the information led to a second conviction of someone already in prison, it might earn less, depending on the crime. Thus, although informants would be sacrificing tickets generated now for a chance to win later, the whole idea is that they have sufficient faith in the value of their information to bother doing so. That motivation would be sorely lacking in typists submitting fake information (and thus bad information), either for themselves, a friend, or by coercion.
It would also still be impossible to completely guarantee the anonymity of informants, even with private + public key encryption technology—and the fewer informants, the higher the risk. A few reasons are listed below:
Informants would need a completely secure terminal to work on. If the hypothetical guilty party suspected one or more informants, they could potentially plant keyloggers / other malicious solutions to capture the information. It is then trivial to correlate personally identifying information with a submitted testimony.
The lottery ticket must be cashed by the informant to claim the prize — it is also a unique code, which is known by the issuing agency. If they were compelled by law (or by some other means), they could find out the identity of whoever cashes that entry code- this could easily be traced by determining the identity of the owner of the bank account the money is deposited into.
The layman informant will be unlikely to take sufficient steps to conceal their identity when submitting information (probably connecting from a personal device, with no proxy)- their IP would be trivial to attain, and hence their location and identity could be established.
It’s true that the fewer the informants, the higher the risk for those informants. However, there is also a greater chance of winning, given accurate information. As I point out in the article, greed can trump fear. So does outrage. But remember also that if informant lotteries caught on, it would stress any group or pair of criminals contemplating a crime. It would tend to spread distrust among them, and so inhibit them in their activities. Also the fact that a crime was in play wouldn’t necessarily be made public immediately. Thus, the informant could have time to take protective measures—measures no doubt planned in advance, given that that person would also know of the lack of other potential informants to hide among.
I’m not sure informants would need a completely secure terminal to work from. People who bank online don’t. Although a criminal party could install a keylogger, as the knowledge of exactly how to get a keylogger and install it spreads among thugs and their enablers, so will knowledge of those keyloggers spread to their intended victims. The solution is a simple one: don’t use your home computer—go somewhere else, or have someone else outside your immediate area do it for you. I think this point also address your third asterisk’s comment: even non-technical people can (and will) quickly learn the basics of computer security, if they haven’t already. Who doesn’t know that computers come with security risks? Certainly an informant lottery log-on page could state the risks and make recommendations, like logging in through a proxy-server to avoid IP tracing. Those deeply concerned might boot up with a thumb drive using Linux, a technique recommended to those seeking strong Bitcoin-wallet security. (Admittedly that would ask a lot of the public, at least at first.) And of course they could use their own or a trusted friend’s smartphone.
As for the second asterisk: the ticket would indeed have a unique code of some kind, but I’m not sure that it would necessarily be known by the issuing agency. There might at first not even be an issuing agency. Instead, informant lotteries might start out as an underground peer-to-peer system based on—of all things—trust, with (rare) lottery payouts made in Bitcoins. Indeed, informant lotteries might turn out to be Bitcoin’s killer app. Of course, all this describes an ungoverned system, with all the benefits and perils. There would be a lot of trial and error. Later, as the system (and Bitcoin) grew in popularity, governments would probably accept the system and possibly even improve it. At that point, an agency would issue the tickets, and couldn’t there be a way to create a PGP-protected ticket-generator to prevent tracing? But even granting your point about the lack of perfect security (even Bitcoins aren’t perfectly anonymous), don’t lose sight of the fact that an informant lottery would surely be better than the present method and its hopeless shortcomings. Perfect the lotteries would not be, but potentially far better than the current alternative.
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Postscript
Keystroke Lotteries: A Speculative Essay stems from an idea I got around Christmas 2003, watching a sales-rep hand out lottery-tickets as gifts in the office where I was employed as a proofreader. I wondered how much, if any, additional work I might do to get an additional ticket. In the years that followed I would occasionally Google as many likely keywords and phrases as I could think of, to see if anyone had already discussed or even implemented a program based on the idea of working online for lottery tickets. As far as I can tell, no one had and no one has still. Finally, in October 2008, I submitted the essential idea to Google’s misbegotten Project 10 ^ 100, condensed to fit its online template (see below). After the Project ended bathetically (or perhaps pathetically), I expanded the core idea and put it on Google’s Knol website, where it supposedly generated 8,000 or so hits. (It actually generated two or three comments). But Knol, like the Project, was a turkey that never flew. It’s shutting down in May of 2012 and has invited its authors to move to WordPress. Regardless, no one will read it, including you, dear non-reader, a figment of my imagination.
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Project 10 ^ 100 version
Title: Auction-funded work lotteries.
150 characters: Growing internet ubiquity may eventually encourage virtual groups of people to work simultaneously on demand for lottery tickets.
300 words: Describe idea in more depth. Hiring a large and ever-changing staff of typesetters to work on the same document would obviate proofreading because it’s unlikely that any one person’s errors would be duplicated by the majority. Instead they would be overwritten by others as a computer assembled a matrix of consensus-validated keystrokes. But paying so many typesetters a market-rate wage wouldn’t be economical. Instead, consider a lottery ticket. However small its payout or winning chances, it can’t be completely valueless before its drawing, given a practical way to obtain one for the least amount of value or work. On a computer, the smallest unit of work is a keystroke or mouse click. So the solution may be to link an essentially random group-validated keystroke to an online lottery-ticket. This method could initially function for any kind of online work requiring little or no interpretation by typists. In time it might successfully be applied to less restrictive kinds of work.
To attract the maximum number of participants, it probably would be essential that a single group-validated keystroke could win the drawing. The lottery itself would be funded by those needing the work done, by bidding on a place in a queue, or for a specific period of work, and/or total number of ‘players’ (workers). Such lotteries could be very large, but given the small unit of work needed to win, some people might not disdain a smaller payoff with a larger winning chance, contrary to conventional lottery-design and player psychology.
150 words: Problem or issue addressed. Around the world people have computers and access to the internet. Some have work to do, and others have bits and pieces of time in which to do it. The problem is how to harvest that time and make use of it on demand. The kind of work to be done requires compensation, but using this proposed model it can’t be priced and allocated conventionally. The solution may be to make an irrational form of compensation accessible to enough people. The internet could do that.
150 words: Who would benefit the most. Successfully implemented, we could have an economically productive and socially benign lottery and all that that entails. Even while using gambling as a lure, it would freely educate participants in its long-term futility. Most would never win a significant payout, even as they hourly watch a news ticker across their computer screens announcing individuals around the world who have. So why pay cash for a Lotto ticket? Although Gamblers Anonymous might go out of business, the virtual pool of labor would never diminish.
Get it started: 150 words. It’s probably inevitable that this kind of development will occur on the internet, if it hasn’t already. Google could test its underlying technical feasibility and scalability, but given how initially destabilizing such lotteries could be, considerable political pressure would be required to convince legislatures and tax authorities to go along. Probably the best way to get it started is to test it, and if successful enough at a small scale, talk about it, and so initiate change from below.
Optimal outcome: 150 words. The optimal outcome for this idea would be its eventual legal acceptance and growth to the point of competing with unskilled forms of gambling, as anyone with internet access, anywhere in the world, keyboards for a few seconds or minutes with an ever-changing number of people on a virtually infinite number of projects.
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