Distributed Labor

There is this free game called Foldit.  This game is about folding proteins, and it has been used to quickly solve a problem that scientists have been working on for years.  The best part is that all of the work put into solving this problem was free.  In trade for challenging entertainment, gamers solved a protein folding problem in 3 weeks, that scientist were not able to solve in 13 years.  This 3 weeks worth of labor was worth more than 13 years worth of wages paid to the scientists trying to solve the problem, and it was done entirely for free.

Now, I have discussed this before, so I will only mention it briefly.  There are tens of millions of unemployed Americans.  Many of these people are on some kind of welfare, and at least one of welfare options for the unemployed requires them to continuously search for jobs that largely do not exist.  In short, they are being paid to waste their time on a fruitless endeavor.

Even worse is the assumption that we need these people to work to maintain our economy.  I want to be clear here: In the U.S., we produce 5 times the food we need to survive.  In fact, we produce pretty much everything necessary for survival in huge excess.  When unemployment was around 11% late last decade, we still produced far more than we needed.  The fact is, the 5.5% of unemployed people looking for employment in May don't need to work to keep our economy going.  No one is going to starve or even be mildly inconvenienced by the fact that these tens of millions of people are living on welfare instead of working for a living.  They are far more important as consumers than as laborers.

Instead of forcing them to go out looking for work that does not exist, I propose we try something else.  I propose that we replace the looking-for-work requirement with a requirement to play games.  At least some of this time should be spent playing games like Foldit (they should play other games as well, because greater variety will help them to become better problem solvers).  Instead of trying to get unemployed people to find mundane work that is little more than a waste of time solving trivial problems, we should leverage this untapped resource of enormous amounts of labor solving real problems that will save lives and help us to solve the truly important problems.

The cost of welfare is nothing compared to the value of this work.  We are talking about an enormous resource that costs a fraction of the price of professionals.  This would free up scientists to do work that no one else can do.  It would dramatically accelerate the advance of science and technology.  And the best part is that our taxes spent on welfare would be producing far more value than forcing people to look for non-existent jobs.

Instead of trying to fight for eliminating welfare, which would cause the greatest economic collapse in the history of the world, let's fight for making participation in productive games replace the worthless job search requirement for getting welfare benefits.