New computer software is now outsourcing menial tasks to people across the world, creating jobs in areas with dramatic unemployment.
“That software, developed by a start-up called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren’t yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts,” writes Technology Review.
MobileWorks assigns tasks using an algorithm, having multiple workers do the same jobs to ensure accuracy. While workers only get paid cents for each task (maybe a few dollars an hour), “overseas crowds have become essential to legitimate businesses,” the article states.
“The price of having MobileWorks have five people look over a receipt is cheaper than the cost of hiring a high-school student at minimum wage to do the task once,” says Jessica Mah, CEO of Web start-up inDinero.
Unfortunately, some jobs posted to MobileWorks and other crowdsourcing sites were for more nefarious purposes, like influencing search results, generating clicks on ads or proliferating spam.
MobileWorks co-founder Anand Kulkarni expressed his frustration about “spammy jobs.”
Despite setbacks, his goal is to have crowdsourcing “behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings.”
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