Beyond today's crowdsourced science to tomorrow's citizen science cyborgs

Millions of citizen scientists have been flocking to projects that pool their time and brainpower to tackle big scientific problems, from astronomy to zoology. Projects such as those hosted by the Zooniverse get people across the globe to donate some part of their cognitive surplus, pool it with others' and apply it to scientific research. But the way in which citizen scientists contribute to the scientific enterprise may be about to change radically: rather than trawling through mountains of data by themselves, they will teach computers how to analyze data. They will teach these intelligent machines how to act like a crowd of human beings. We're on the verge of a huge change – not just in how we do citizen science, but how we do science itself.