Minds for Sale

Overview

When most people think of crowdsourcing, wikipedia is the first thing that comes to mind. What better way to harness the entirety of human knowledge than to outsource its consolidation and summary to the entirety of mankind. The internet has found myriad ways like this to capture the collective power of its users, but this process of crowdsourcing, while powerful, raises several serious concerns.

Sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk indicate a disturbing trend in cyberspace towards treating people like behaviorist creatures who, for small rewards, accomplish potentially biased tasks without awareness of their moral valence. From more obviously sinister examples like Texas allowing people to virtually police the Mexican border through open access webcams to seemingly unproblematic tasks like committing, filming and posting a random act of kindness for a reward of fifty cents, these forms of transaction raise major concerns about this nascent but extremely powerful industry and what it means to treat human minds as an entirely accountable resource.

Relevant Models

• http://www.worth1000.com
• Amazon's Mechanical Turk
• http://www.innocentive.com/
• http://www.liveops.com/
• Gwap.com: Home of the ESP Game and Tag That Tune
• Internet Eyes
• http://www.smartdrive.net/

Recommended Readings

• Minds for Sale: Ubiquitous Human Computing and the Future of the Internet
• Luis von Ahn's Berkman Luncheon on Human Computation (video)
• Aaron Shaw, John Horton, Daniel Chen "Designing Incentives for Inexpert Human Raters", March 20, 2011.
• Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, (New York: Penguin Group) 2006
• Charles Leadbeater, "Chapter Three: How We Think works (and not)", We-think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production, (London: Profile Books LTD) 2008
  • We Think Video Summary
• Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard: Ubiquitous human computing will transcend geography (video)

Related Case Examples

• Case Study: Herdict

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