In a Guardian piece, Killian Fox and Joanne O’Connor look at the future of employment, that increasingly shaky thing, from a variety of angles: robotics, workplace surveillance, the end of retirement, etc. One segment focuses on the “human cloud,” which outsources tasks into the ether, perhaps flattening the world a little but definitely flattening wages. An excerpt:

In the past decade cloud computing has radically altered the way we work, but it’s the growth of the “human cloud” – a vast global pool of freelancers who are available to work on demand from remote locations on a mind-boggling array of digital tasks – which is really set to shake up the world of work.

The past five years have seen a proliferation of online platforms that match employers (known in cloud-speak as “requesters”) with freelancers (often referred to as “taskers”), inviting them to bid for each task. Two of the biggest sites are Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which lays claim to 500,000 “turkers” from 190 countries at any given time, and Upwork, which estimates that it has 10 million freelancers from 180 countries on its database. They compete for approximately 3m tasks or projects each year, which can range from tagging photos to writing code. The market is evolving so quickly that it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people are using these sites worldwide, but management consultants McKinsey estimate that by 2025 some 540 million workers will have used one of these platforms to find work.

The benefits for companies using these sites are obvious: instant access to a pool of cheap, willing talent, without having to go through lengthy recruitment processes. And no need to pay overheads and holiday or sick pay. For the “taskers” the benefits are less clear cut. Champions of the crowdsourcing model claim that it’s a powerful force for the redistribution of wealth, bringing a fresh stream of income and flexible work into emerging economies such as India and the Philippines (two of the biggest markets for these platforms). But herein lies the problem, as far as critics are concerned. By inviting people to bid for work, sites such as Upwork inevitably trigger a “race to the bottom”, with workers in Mumbai or Manila able to undercut their peers in Geneva or London thanks to their lower living costs.

“It’s a factor in driving down real wages and increasing inequality,” says Guy Standing, professor of economics at SOAS, University of London. He has written two books on the “precariat”, which he defines as an emerging global class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career progression. He argues that falling wages in this sector, with workers often willing to complete tasks for as little as $1 an hour, will eventually have a knock-on effect on the wages of traditional employees and contribute to the growth of the precariat. “And it’s not just unskilled labour that’s being done online,” says Standing. “It goes all the way up: legal services, medical diagnosis, architectural services, accounting – it’s affecting the whole spectrum.”

Love it or loathe it, the human cloud is here to stay.•