This is not the first interesting technological crowd-sourced thing I've seen, but surely it strikes me as unique.
Its premise is delightful. Human beings are simply better at pattern recognition than computers. So, rather than having an enormous binary-based machine try out exponential numbers of possible combinations, make it fun. Give it a point system. Tell people how they score against their neighbors (I made the second highest score ever on one of the puzzles! No really!), and then help them to recognize that their 'gaming' is doing some research for various genetic disorders linked to various pathologies. It's a winning nexus, it seems, and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go play a game and save lives. Really. It's worth 15 minutes of your time to learn and play a few.
It does raise one question for me, though. Certainly, Phylo is ingenious. It's wonderful, sitting at a convergent human psychological spot of competition, success, altruism, and the raw desire everyone seems to have to match little glowy things in the right order. I think it deserves all kinds of kudos for that.
The itch it raises for me is that it tacitly plays into the sense that seems to hang around our culture that ingenuity and fun will solve all of our problems. I still guffaw when people comment that science will surely save us from global warming with an intriguing and easy solution, that off-shore oil drilling will have an easy, chemical-free cleanup with just a little elbow grease and human-know-how. I'm sure it's because I sometimes work with people who are dying and addicts, but not every problem has a fun solution. Sometimes, there is only endurance, forbearance, and sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to change, but the situation isn't going to.
That continues to be what strikes me as challenging in our world. It's not that our economic problems and ecological crises don't have solutions. They do, or at least they have actions that would terrifically ameliorate things. We could simply cut our standard of living by half. We could simply turn electricity off for 12 hours a day. We could change--we're like the morbidly obese, confusing "hard to change" with "impossible to change." It would cut into productivity, into our entertainment, and into our god-given-right-to-do-whatever-the-hell-we-please-at-any-cost, which seems to be the demonic way we understand 'freedom'. No one thinks sacrifice is possible, and we all point and laugh at the wackos who choose to live off the grid, set up solar panels, and cut the meat in their diet to a quarter of its previous level.
And yet: what if economic justice and ecological sustainability are not human ingenuity puzzles, but rather ascetic puzzles, or sacrificial conundrums? What if what we need is not a new idea, a brilliant way to make living ecologically more fun, but an actual change of life? Some repentance? A conversion?
