Kittur et al (2013) The Future of Crowd Work
“Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate?” [1]
“I am a human being, not an algorithm” [2]
In their paper on the future of paid crowd work Kittur et al ask us to imagine what type of crowd workplace we would want for the next generation. It’s an attempt to move us away from focussing on the negative aspects of paid crowd work and towards an innovative, research-led approach to making crowd work more satisfying and sustainable for all.
We might typically think of crowdsourcing in a voluntary context; Wikipedia and Kickstarter being classic examples. However a paid crowd work industry is growing, including micro-labour platforms where work is broken down into discrete tasks, by ‘requesters’, which are then distributed among many ‘workers’.
The advantages for requesters include having access to a flexible workforce which can quickly fill specific skill shortages. The advantages for workers include new opportunities for income and social mobility. For each side of the equation, geography is no longer a barrier.
However, crowd work has been much criticised for encouraging a ‘race to the bottom’ for both workers – who may see their pay and working conditions fall – and requesters – who may struggle to control the quality of the resulting work. The authors suggest that the current microtask model where workers are assigned small homogenous tasks to produce an output is insufficient. Instead they propose a framework which envisages how crowd work can support more complex and creative professional work. They include a role for AI in this framework; as guiding, and guided by, crowd workers. Twelve specific work foci are deemed necessary for realising such a future.
The authors proceed to outline three design goals to demonstrate how these 12 foci can lead to next steps and calls to action for a better future of crowd work. A crucial step is to prevent crowd work from being a ‘dead end’ and encourage the creation of career ladders whereby workers can progress through a career trajectory. However, I would have liked this paper to expand upon how requesters (and/or the platforms) could be incentivised to support this.
I also wondered whether the problems of crowd work are really that different from the problems of work in general in 21st century global capitalism. The paper talks of ‘past labour abuses’ but the reduction/denial of workers’ rights, lack of job security, undercutting of pay and zero hour contracts are all features of offline modern day employment. I would have liked more social and political context and background to explain why crowd work has developed in the way it has.
Finally, given the goal of supporting complexity, creativity and humanity in crowd work there was some irony in the authors’ proposing that crowdsourced labour markets could be viewed as ‘large distributed systems in which each person is analogous to a processor’.
The paper I have chosen which builds upon my core reading this week is “Accessible crowdwork? Understanding the value in and challenge of microtask employment for people with disabilities” (2015) [3]. This is a topic of personal interest to me as I helped found a cooperative of people with long term health conditions who share pieces of work – online and offline – that would be too demanding for us to complete as individuals. I had not previously made the connection between this and crowd work and I enjoyed thinking about if/how cooperative systems of organisation could fit into a framework for crowd work’s future.
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