Crowdsourcing: Great Expectations or Great Exploitations?

In the true spirit of crowdsourcing, I debated long and hard about posting this assignment to Mechanical Turk to see how little I could pay to skip out on it. But alas, my integrity insists and you are stuck with little ol’ me instead of a brilliant Indian computer programmer or a dashing Turkish dancer, both of whom I’m sure would not only be much more eloquent writers, but also more knowledgeable on the subject of crowdsourcing. After all, every major corporation’s doing it. Heck, isn’t that what most blogs are today too—someone jamming a bunch of virtual heads together by sprinkling some opinion between a crowd of links? Well, maybe not quite, but I’m graduating with an MBA in just a few months and the economy is lower than my old plumber’s pants, so this "source it to the crowd" buzz has made me a bit uneasy—should I have majored in Crowd Sorcerer or maybe Lead Crowdsourcing Consultant? As if the reality of unemployment isn’t bad enough, now we’ve got compete virtually for 10 cents a HIT (on a good day)? Is this really where jobs are headed with the advent of the internet?

I mean, I get it; I have always been a fan of the “two heads are better than one” idea. Look at the success of Wikipedia, who doesn’t find it useful at one time or another? But I have to question whether crowdsourcing will actually prove to be more helpful in cutting US corporate research costs or harmful in eliminating US jobs via the web. After all, crowds are highly susceptible to “mania” and if a fire breaks out…stampeding. What happens then and who is responsible?

So yes, the idea that gathering input from a wide array of sources will result in a better end product is a good one, but until virtual task requesters opt to file taxes and enforce a set of guidelines to protect against the exploitation of workers, I’m afraid many crowdsourcing applications will become “virtual sweatshops.”