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 (where you can find this essay posted on my blog of sorts, http://keystrokelotteries.wordpress.com/).

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.