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Can Crowdsourcing Make a Dent in Unemployment? Ask MobileWorks.

33 points by anandkulkarni 15y ago

prayag 15y ago
Co-founder here. MobileWorks is a YCS11 company. I can check in from time-to-time to answer any questions HN'ers might have.
- russjhammond 15y ago
  From your experience are there any new types of tasks you see on the horizon other than just the standard photo tagging, text recognition, etc?
  - anandkulkarni 15y ago
    Absolutely! The future potential of crowds lies in real-time applications, and we're seeing these emerge with increasing frequency. Embedding intelligence in software applications is a powerful concept. We can build applications that understand our intentions in natural language, that talk to us, and that amplify our ability to do work in new and powerful ways. Putting cheap human intelligence into software lets us realize the vision laid out for AI systems fifty years ago.
  - prayag 15y ago
    Adding to what anandkulkarni said, some people have proposed very innovative applications on top of the MobileWorks. Applications such as spam-filtering, object recognition etc. can revolutionize what is possible using software.
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
The xconomy.com web site is completely broken if you have NoScript enabled; after about 2 seconds it forwards to the FRONT PAGE of the mobile site. Sigh. Luckily you can hit ESC to stop it from forwarding you, but then if you want to read the second page, be quick on the draw with ESC again or it will send you back to the mobile site again. Incompetent developers.
notahacker 15y ago
The question the article should be asking is whether there actually are any tasks for which anonymous, unqualified, remote labourers based in the US have >15x the market value of anonymous, unqualified remote workers based overseas? [It would be interesting to hear any ideas MobileWorks have if they're willing to share them at this stage] The article also skirted the issue of whether the increasing ease of outsourcing work for $5 per man day might actually be a major cause of structural unemployment in the US, even if you take the view that the net benefit outweighs those job losses (I do). Sure, in the longer run companies that have effectively substituted for US-based workers may ultimately reinvest their increased profits into something that creates demand for US labour, and many of the jobs performed by crowdsourcers were never viable full-time employment opportunities in the first place. But if crowdsourcing is to make a dent in unemployment it'll have to start by making up for the jobs it's creatively destroyed...
- anandkulkarni 15y ago
  Sure, I'd be happy to share our perspective. There are several unskilled tasks where US workers are required and where pay be sizably higher – for example, work dealing with sensitive customer data or security-sensitive content is often restricted to US nationals to comply with privacy and chain-of-custody requirements. Companies know that they're getting additional value from US workers and are willing to pay a higher price. But for the record, our workers are neither anonymous nor unqualified, which is a central advantage we have over other companies in the crowd space. This means that where we're looking, we're not talking just about unskilled labor – we're talking about all kinds of work. I wish it were as easy as you suggest to outsource work online for $5 a man-day! The rise of traditional outsourcing has certainly contributed to a loss of employment in the US over the last twenty years, but it's still incredibly difficult to outsource work online (part of the raison d'etre for MobileWorks!) You'd be hard-pressed to find too many instances of jobs that have disappeared due to online crowdsourcing in the last five years compared to the traditional outsourcing economy. Given the scope of outsourcing's effects, crowdsourcing is likely to be one of the few ways we can draw work back into the US.
- trevelyan 15y ago
  The idea that the US suffers from structural unemployment is a conservative red herring intended to justify government inaction in the face of an unemployment crisis that is gutting our generation, all the while spreading the misconception that the unemployed are all lazy or unskilled. In a situation of real structural unemployment, we would have a lot of unemployment in a few specific industries where consumer demand has collapsed (because people are spending money elsewhere), but have this offset by rising wages, rising prices, and massive business investment in other industries which produce things people want to buy instead. This is the story of the dot-com boom, where high school dropouts were trained into server admins because Disney and every other company out there wanted to run their own search engine. This is nothing close to what we see. The economy has been poor since 2001, and since 2008 employment has fallen in practically every sector except internet, health care and mining. Silicon Valley is a bright spot, but it's job creation is trivial in the scheme of things. And even here much of the activity has been driven by loose monetary policy rather than an underlying shift in consumer spending. The fact we aren't getting as many bubble stories these days also leads me to suspect that even in California things are now getting slightly worse -- something unexpected under the structural explanation where we'd expect things to be heating up even more in this situation.
viandante 15y ago
Let's just remember that all the money saved non rehiring people is not lost, it is probably going to increase investments/savings. And with that, the reality of unemployed people is a bit different. The point, in fact, is finding out why those more savings are not creating new jobs throughout investments. The way I see it, we are in a period where demand is really difficult to predict and understand. Which brings to more bad investments than usual, which then brings less jobs... It is a really complex problem, it can't be solved by a web app. Especially it can't be solved with low paid jobs.
- jellicle 15y ago
  It's not a complex problem. Investment follows demand. If 500 people are clamoring for a new daycare in a certain area, someone will invest and create one. If there's no demand for a new daycare, it doesn't matter whether money is available; no new daycare will be created (and if one is created, it will fail). The solutions to creating new jobs do NOT revolve around creating more investment money. There is a TREMENDOUS excess of investment money available in the world today. The solutions all revolve around creating more demand for the things that investment money can buy, which typically involve getting more money into the hands of poor people.
  - viandante 15y ago
    == which typically involve getting more money into the hands of poor people == An there we go. I absolutely agree if we discuss about helping the poor and having a good public welfare. But there is no connection that I know between giving money to the poor and economic growth.
jellicle 15y ago
Well, yes, crowdsourcing can make a dent in unemployment, but the dent is in the wrong direction: crowdsourcing clearly increases unemployment.

33 points by anandkulkarni 15y ago

Co-founder here. MobileWorks is a YCS11 company. I can check in from time-to-time to answer any questions HN'ers might have.

russjhammond 15y ago
From your experience are there any new types of tasks you see on the horizon other than just the standard photo tagging, text recognition, etc?
- anandkulkarni 15y ago
  Absolutely! The future potential of crowds lies in real-time applications, and we're seeing these emerge with increasing frequency. Embedding intelligence in software applications is a powerful concept. We can build applications that understand our intentions in natural language, that talk to us, and that amplify our ability to do work in new and powerful ways. Putting cheap human intelligence into software lets us realize the vision laid out for AI systems fifty years ago.
- prayag 15y ago
  Adding to what anandkulkarni said, some people have proposed very innovative applications on top of the MobileWorks. Applications such as spam-filtering, object recognition etc. can revolutionize what is possible using software.

SomeCallMeTim 15y ago

The xconomy.com web site is completely broken if you have NoScript enabled; after about 2 seconds it forwards to the FRONT PAGE of the mobile site. Sigh. Luckily you can hit ESC to stop it from forwarding you, but then if you want to read the second page, be quick on the draw with ESC again or it will send you back to the mobile site again. Incompetent developers.

notahacker 15y ago

The question the article should be asking is whether there actually are any tasks for which anonymous, unqualified, remote labourers based in the US have >15x the market value of anonymous, unqualified remote workers based overseas? [It would be interesting to hear any ideas MobileWorks have if they're willing to share them at this stage] The article also skirted the issue of whether the increasing ease of outsourcing work for $5 per man day might actually be a major cause of structural unemployment in the US, even if you take the view that the net benefit outweighs those job losses (I do). Sure, in the longer run companies that have effectively substituted for US-based workers may ultimately reinvest their increased profits into something that creates demand for US labour, and many of the jobs performed by crowdsourcers were never viable full-time employment opportunities in the first place. But if crowdsourcing is to make a dent in unemployment it'll have to start by making up for the jobs it's creatively destroyed...

anandkulkarni 15y ago
Sure, I'd be happy to share our perspective. There are several unskilled tasks where US workers are required and where pay be sizably higher – for example, work dealing with sensitive customer data or security-sensitive content is often restricted to US nationals to comply with privacy and chain-of-custody requirements. Companies know that they're getting additional value from US workers and are willing to pay a higher price. But for the record, our workers are neither anonymous nor unqualified, which is a central advantage we have over other companies in the crowd space. This means that where we're looking, we're not talking just about unskilled labor – we're talking about all kinds of work. I wish it were as easy as you suggest to outsource work online for $5 a man-day! The rise of traditional outsourcing has certainly contributed to a loss of employment in the US over the last twenty years, but it's still incredibly difficult to outsource work online (part of the raison d'etre for MobileWorks!) You'd be hard-pressed to find too many instances of jobs that have disappeared due to online crowdsourcing in the last five years compared to the traditional outsourcing economy. Given the scope of outsourcing's effects, crowdsourcing is likely to be one of the few ways we can draw work back into the US.
trevelyan 15y ago
The idea that the US suffers from structural unemployment is a conservative red herring intended to justify government inaction in the face of an unemployment crisis that is gutting our generation, all the while spreading the misconception that the unemployed are all lazy or unskilled. In a situation of real structural unemployment, we would have a lot of unemployment in a few specific industries where consumer demand has collapsed (because people are spending money elsewhere), but have this offset by rising wages, rising prices, and massive business investment in other industries which produce things people want to buy instead. This is the story of the dot-com boom, where high school dropouts were trained into server admins because Disney and every other company out there wanted to run their own search engine. This is nothing close to what we see. The economy has been poor since 2001, and since 2008 employment has fallen in practically every sector except internet, health care and mining. Silicon Valley is a bright spot, but it's job creation is trivial in the scheme of things. And even here much of the activity has been driven by loose monetary policy rather than an underlying shift in consumer spending. The fact we aren't getting as many bubble stories these days also leads me to suspect that even in California things are now getting slightly worse -- something unexpected under the structural explanation where we'd expect things to be heating up even more in this situation.

viandante 15y ago

Let's just remember that all the money saved non rehiring people is not lost, it is probably going to increase investments/savings. And with that, the reality of unemployed people is a bit different. The point, in fact, is finding out why those more savings are not creating new jobs throughout investments. The way I see it, we are in a period where demand is really difficult to predict and understand. Which brings to more bad investments than usual, which then brings less jobs... It is a really complex problem, it can't be solved by a web app. Especially it can't be solved with low paid jobs.

jellicle 15y ago
It's not a complex problem. Investment follows demand. If 500 people are clamoring for a new daycare in a certain area, someone will invest and create one. If there's no demand for a new daycare, it doesn't matter whether money is available; no new daycare will be created (and if one is created, it will fail). The solutions to creating new jobs do NOT revolve around creating more investment money. There is a TREMENDOUS excess of investment money available in the world today. The solutions all revolve around creating more demand for the things that investment money can buy, which typically involve getting more money into the hands of poor people.
- viandante 15y ago
  == which typically involve getting more money into the hands of poor people == An there we go. I absolutely agree if we discuss about helping the poor and having a good public welfare. But there is no connection that I know between giving money to the poor and economic growth.

jellicle 15y ago

Well, yes, crowdsourcing can make a dent in unemployment, but the dent is in the wrong direction: crowdsourcing clearly increases unemployment.