They are the invisible labourers whose toil in the digital economy powers many rising technology firms.
Crowdworkers pick up the slack where artificial intelligence meets its limits. They do small online data tasks, on an outsourced basis and usually from home, that involve basic computer skills, from labelling images and transcription to identifying pornography, which machines and algorithms alone cannot manage. The work is often repetitive and simple but requires human judgment and insight.
“For a lot of entrepreneurs working on lean start-up budgets, it’s not viable to take somebody on to do this work,” says Lilly Irani, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who sees the phenomenon as part of the broader socio-economic reconfiguration ushered in by on-demand services such as Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit.
“[Crowdwork is] making large segments of labour infinitely flexible through computers and apps for a certain class of people – innovators and entrepreneurs,” says Ms Irani.
There are no exact figures but active crowdworkers are believed to number hundreds of thousands globally, with most concentrated in the US and India.
Champions of this emerging sector say the work is flexible and provides a path out of poverty for people in developing nations, as well as a financial lifeline in countries with weak social safety nets. Its critics say that the often minimal pay – sometimes as low as 50 cents an hour – and absence of employment rights, such as guaranteed work, sick pay and holidays, sits uneasily with the world-changing aspirations of the tech entrepreneurs and engineers who farm out the mouse-clicking and keyboard-tapping assignments.