When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the Red Cross announced the opening of a toll-free hotline to help victims and their families find each other. The hotline quickly filled up. Therefore, the Red Cross turned to a little-known company called -LiveOps, which recruited call agents from all over the world and directed their work entirely through the Internet. Within three hours, it has arranged 300 people to staff the phones. A few days later, free agents handled more than 17,000 calls.

This success story—combining impressive numbers with a good career—is an example of a new phenomenon: the use of the Internet can not only aggregate and access computing power, but also discover and guide talent. Invoking the current frenzy surrounding cloud computing, what your computer did in the past is now happening online, and a new type of company is promoting cloud workforce. "Get fast turnaround time for tasks that computers can't complete," one website says. "You can attract thousands of people without answering the phone." This new form of labor has begun to become popular in the post-financial crisis world. It can create efficiencies and opportunities that economists have dreamed of so far. It may also usher in a new era of digital sweatshops.

To understand how radical this new form of labor is, consider how it has worked so far. This is a variety of pyramids whose services are designed to tap the most important (and rare) ingenuity, while other services recruit anyone with brain waves at the bottom. At the top of the pyramid are companies such as InnoCentive, a company founded by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. It is essentially an eBay that solves difficult problems. Companies ask questions that they cannot easily answer internally, and then set a bonus for answering these questions before a certain deadline. Think you can find a way to prevent orange juice stored in transparent bottles from turning brown? There may be $20,000 in it for you. Or you may know how to produce "new non-commercial thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid amide material supply"?

In the middle of the pyramid is a task that pays less but does not require Thomas Edison's brain. This is where a virtual call center organization like LiveOps fits. It relies on more than 20,000 “contractors” (who are not regular employees) working from home. Once they pass the tests of reading comprehension and basic computer skills, they can start working. They may first forward the takeaway order of a hungry caller to a restaurant franchise. Tired of playing, they can turn to the Red Cross hotline for a period of time, or apply for renewal membership for the regional car club. In a market like Elance, you can design bids for your website or provide fast turnaround time for people willing to draft an article about distributed labor. Elans said that since 2002, thousands of these tasks have changed hands for tens of millions of dollars and flowed to more than 100,000 people.

At the bottom of the pyramid are unconscious tasks that are still too tricky for computers. Amazon's little-known but game-changing Mechanical Turk provides tasks for as little as a penny. A task displays pictures and asks "Turkers" to tag them with keywords. Another looks for someone who knows the owner of the coffee shop, and then asks them to send an email to the boss for $1 per recipient. The staff found the site by themselves or heard about it from friends.

All this sounds great, and in many ways. The Internet has created a new market for labor that may be collected anywhere in the world-in fact, a company called CrowdFlower has set up a special program to direct tasks to refugees working in Kenyan data centers. Elsewhere, these services provide people working from home with more options than commuting to a single employer. For those who need to get the job done, these services also provide unprecedented flexibility: tasks can be added immediately, and prices reflect fierce competition in a huge labor pool.

What can I worry about? On the one hand, online contracts circumvent a series of labor laws and practices in most developed countries that govern worker protection, minimum wages, health and retirement benefits, and child labor. Any jurisdiction that imposes restrictions on how crowdsourcing services operate may find itself bypassed-a company like LiveOps can simply disconnect all its contractors in New York, etc., and help people in Arizona Provide more work. Workers may have to accept near-continuous monitoring of every mouse click and conversation. Many of these services require workers not to disclose that they have worked for a company. Your reputation is just another trade secret.

People can also be recruited for work without knowing who or why they work. You may synthesize a new chemical substance and end up being used as a poison or bomb. Iran’s leaders can ask the Turks to compare the faces of the country’s 72 million citizens with the faces of the demonstrators being photographed. According to the current fee schedule of Mechanical Turk, the cost of Repression 2.0 is only $17,000 per protester.

If labor can be summoned and directed from a distance, those who try to influence its results will not pollute less and less interactions. I saw a future park where visitors stared at the small screen, clicked or talked. One person completed the $10,000 challenge answer. Another casually invited three friends to watch a movie with him that night, not because he wanted to watch it, but because he would earn $10 in commission. The third is to use a penny to calculate how many people there are, not knowing why or who is important. We may miss the days when we went to the park to have fun.

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