It's Not Just Robots: Skilled Jobs Are Going to "Meatware" -- Backchannel

Harry K. sits at his desk in Vancouver, Canada, scanning sepia-tinted swirls, loops and blobs on his computer screen. Every second or so, he jabs at his mouse and adds a fluorescent dot to the image. After a minute, a new image pops up in front of him. Harry is tagging images of cells removed from breast cancers. It's a painstaking job but not a difficult one, he says: "It's like playing Etch A Sketch or a video game where you color in certain dots." Harry found the gig on Crowdflower, a crowdworking platform. Usually that cell-tagging task would be the job of pathologists, who typically start their careers with annual salaries of around 200,000 -- an hourly wage of about 80. Harry, on the other hand, earns just four cents for annotating a batch of five images, which takes him between two to eight minutes. His hourly wage is about 60 cents. Granted, Harry can't perform most of the tasks in a pathologist's repertoire.