Assembly lines are coming out of the factory (Image: Andy Sacks/Getty)
From writing encyclopedia entries to designing furniture, a new kind of crowdsourcing could change the way we work
WHEN it appeared on Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website run by Amazon, Boris Smus’s request looked unremarkable. He wanted people to search the web and gather a few facts about New York City. Workers snapped up the tasks and answers rolled in within minutes. Quick to complete and requiring no specialist skills, it was typical of work available on the site, which usually pays a few cents per task.
There was,…
