I'm not sure it is. Yes, an AI solution isn't necessarily an easy problem to solve, but once it is solved, it scales extremely well. Having someone pick strawbe

I'm not sure it is. Yes, an AI solution isn't necessarily an easy problem to solve, but once it is solved, it scales extremely well. Having someone pick strawberries by robot does not. For every robot, you need an individual at the helm. How do you train them? How do deal with fluctuations in the number of people interested in picking at any given time? In a game like described above, part of the appeal is people have 0 obligations. They can start when they'd like, they can finish when they'd like, and there is no real world prize/penalty based on how well/poorly they perform. A person can hop on for 30 seconds or 5 hours, on a whim. They can get distracted, completely screw up, or sit idly while they do something else, and there are no real world consequences. If you try to recreate that same lack of obligation for a real world problem, you very likely could be setting yourself up for hurdles you simply can't deal with. If you begin to add consequences, you remove the appeal of the games with no obligations, and people won't participate. AI is hard to get going, but I'm not sure it is any more difficult than some of these other options, and once you do, you will scale far better.