Donating labor to forge your own shackles

In a comment at an O'Reilly Radar post about Google Image Labeler, Thomas Lord throws a little cold water on crowdsourcing euphoria:

We ought to worry about the conjunction of (a) a return to the days of exchanging labor for goods and services by barter; (b) a very, very, very, (very) low price for labor; (c) the direction of of said cheap labor to the creation and improvement of privately held databases of non-trivial utility in population manipulation; (d) the difficulty of even experts to grasp the signficance of these databases, nevermind the average laborer who contributes to them. George Dyson just keeps sounding more and more right.

Not so worried about (a) specificially -- voluntary trade of any for any is AOK AFAIC -- but (b), (c), and (d) might have sharp edges in the future. Handle with care!

Tags: crowdsourcing, pessimism, contrarianism, thomas+lord, open+data, privacy

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