When my daughter was four, she coined a term for what she saw her father doing all too often: computering. She is now eight, and papa is still computering too much. So is everyone else.

Computering is different from computing, of course. While I’m computering, my computer may be computing, but I’m just typing away. I could be writing email, or word processing or surfing the web or instant messaging or tweeting or blogging.

The point is that computering covers all of the above, with the sort of compactness and clarity that characterizes good English coinage.

Of course, some linguistic snobs abhor the casual verbifying of perfectly good nouns. Put since the language of information technology thrives on verbifications – googling, blogging and friending being just a few examples – computering ought not to raise any eyebrows.

So why isn’t ‘computer’ already a widely used verb?

After all, I computer, you computer, we all computer. Don’t we?

Did the world really have to wait for my daughter to invent this useful term?

And why on Earth am I writing about this in a blog about citizen cyberscience??

The reason (besides a chance to boast about my creative daughter) is that I’ve just been reading the book You are not a Gadget by virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier. And in it, he coins the word computationalism, to describe a belief system that he argues is shared by just about everyone in Silicon Valley.

Lanier, whose book is a dystopian look at the dehumanizing aspects of the internet, sums up computationalism as a philosophy – or perhaps a culture – which views the world as a computational process with people as sub-processes. He then goes on to criticize the sort of logic this leads to, in particular equating sufficiently large and complex computers with human minds.

Now the first thing you’ll notice here, I hope, is that Jaron Lanier has coined a noun, computationalism, that is quite a mouthful, and really only useful for very specialized discourse. My four-year old daughter, on the other hand, coined a verb that describes succinctly what an increasingly large part of humanity is doing. Who’s cleverer, Jaron or my daughter? You take your pick.

The second point, which brings me back to citizen cyberscience, is that Jaron’s computationalism is an underlying theme in a lot of the visionary talk about where citizen cyberscience might go.

Luis von Ahn (the ESP game), for example, likes to use the example of the number of people who play backgammon in the world, and what all the time they spend playing backgammon in a year could otherwise be used for (building the Panama Canal multiple times, for example).

Matt Blumberg (Grid Republic) uses the example of world cup football. According to FIFA, The cumulative audience of the 64 matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup was expected to be in excess of 26bn. (In other words, since there are barely 7bn people on the planet, on average every person watched 4 of the 64 matches.)

Now mutiply 26bn by 90 minutes, and you get nearly 4.5 million years of human concentration focussed on that one sporting event. Imagine what you could do with that, instead of watching world cup football.

For example, Google has about 25,000 famously high-IQ employees. It would take them nearly 180 years to use up that much brainpower on anything. Just imagine what Google, not yet a decade old, could achieve in 180 years.

Forget it. No one can imagine that.

The point of these sorts of comparisons is not that anyone is seriously proposing that people should stop playing backgammon or watching football. The point is that there is a lot of spare brainpower around that could be used for other, more productive goal. Like solving problems in science, perhaps.

Author Clay Shirky has dubbed this cognitive surplus. Others have dubbed words with similar connotations, like “crowdsourcing”, “volunteer thinking”, “distributed intelligence”, “human computation” and so on.

Oh, yes, and “citizen cyberscience”.

There is a view of citizen cyberscience – which some of my colleagues in the field seriously espouse – as a system that might be programmed in the same way as a computer. Some participants would do simple tasks, and others would do more complex ones, and so on up the hierarchy. At the top, a clever scientist would oversee all this effort, to ensure that it solves some tremendously complex problem. This is computationalism at its grandest, in my view.

And to some extent, this is how most volunteer thinking projects work today. Stardust@home or GalaxyZoo are 1st-order examples, with essentially just one level of task, and the scientists overseeing the results. Actually, many research labs are organized this way, too, with Ph.D. students doing the gruntwork, supervised by postdocs, managed by assistant professors, with a tenured professor at the top, formulating the grand directions for the group’s research.

So is computationalism the way to go? Should developers of volunteer thinking projects start planning increasingly sophisticated and stratified levels of participation, to tackle more complex problems?

It’s certainly a tempting route to pursue, if you have a computationalistic view of the world. But at some level, I find it dispiriting. Because it reduces the challenge of citizen cyberscience to that of time-and-motion organization of a factory, with low-skill workers on the assembly line, supervised by those with more experience and skills, and so on up the ladder. At the top is the manager of the factory who reaps most of the rewards of this carefully layered organization.

What I would like to explore instead, is a route where citizen cyberscience projects become increasingly open-ended, with the volunteers contributing not only to small well-defined tasks, but also – in a largely self-organized way – to figuring out the best way to manage larger tasks. Perhaps, even, contributing to the overall strategy pursued by each project.

This is not completely outlandish. In fact, there are already encouraging examples from some projects that this can happen spontaneously, even if the scientists at the origin of the project did not plan for it. My favourit example is a wiki set up by participants in the protein-folding game Foldit, which allowed them to share and discuss strategies used for solving the protein-folding problem. This was documented in the journal Nature last year.

Ultimately, the participants were able to formulate new strategies and divvy up the task of exploring a much wider solution space than originally anticipated. This result was an unanticipated benefit that took the project in new directions. It also inspired the scientists with completely new algorithms – developed by human participants – that could help improve computer-based searching as well.

In physics, there was a fad a few years ago for studying “emergent properties” in complex systems. Emergent, in this context, means patterns and structures that seem much more complex than the simple rules defining how the system behaves. Like the beautiful forms of snowflakes or indeed the ways neurons interact in the brain to produce thoughts.

For me, Foldit is a beautiful example of the emergent properties of a network of human minds connected by the Internet. I’d like to call it computationalism with human characteristics.

In citizen cyberscience, I think the real excitement will be when people – and not necessarily just scientists – start creating more projects like Foldit that provide just enough tools and direction for something meaningful to come out, while leaving enough space for genuine surprises to occur.

This is a future worth computering towards.

 

 

 

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