You might already be familiar with Mechanical Turk, a service run by Amazon...
I have been thinking about the "CrowdSourcing" concept for a long time now - the general idea is to utilize the massive amount of people who are surfing the web to drive various agendas.
Wikipedia is a nice, none-profit positive example for this but there are many commercial entities that take advantage of this resource to generate profit, with little to no resistance from internet users... it seems that the common belief is that it is perfectly ok for a user to get a large amount of "views\hits" on his page - and never be rewarded for it... not directly.
One of Mechanical Turk's features are:
"Have access to a global, on-demand, 24 x 7 workforce" Since I have been working on virtual worlds for a while now... the first thing that pops to my head when reading it is that having those people in 3D, in a virtual world makes them more useful!
Having that virtual world mapped to the Real Life one (with Augmented Reality and electronic devices) makes them useful in the real world too - e.g. I suspect we will see Human Controlled intelligent robots (24x7 up time) before Artificially Intelligent ones. Populating an on-demand space with on-demand qualified work force (whenever it is in Real Life, Virtual World or mixed) lets you visually take a peek at them like dolls in a doll house and visually\spatially analyze what is happening there... also it will save humanity for a little bit until Artificial Intelligence could do everything without human help.
Hopefully one day there will be some sort of an "Internet Citizen" bill of rights - until then the Mechanical Turk will keep employing countless people for waaaaaay bellow minimum wage with no benefits.
