Depending on who you ask TaskRabbit is either redefining work, or making workers into indensured servants. Laura Busque, the founder of TaskRabbit explained to The Telegraph:
What TaskRabbit does is match freelance labour to local demand. Workers are characterised as entrepreneurs. As Busque says, ‘Every tasker is the CEO of their own business!’ If you want your house cleaned or a shelf put up, then, for a 15 to 30 per cent fee, the platform will find you a ‘tasker’. (‘We find “rabbit” a bit demeaning,’ Busque says.)So on the one hand you have people doing menial tasks (though not being called "rabbits" because that's "demeaning") while on the other it turns out that these people are actually entrepreneurs. And if you really want to be among the first people to buy a new iPhone but your time is too important for you to wait in line overnight, there's an entrepreneur whom you can pay to sleep in that line for you. At present, at least, we still need real people to hold our place in line, but perhaps in the not too distant future there will be a bot for that. And some jobs have considerably more value than others. In that same Telegraph article we learn:
One of the company’s proudest stories is of a mother who hired a tasker to visit her son in hospital as he underwent chemotherapy. ‘[It is] a great example of TaskRabbit’s core mission,’ the company blog reads. ‘Bringing people together to help each other.’No mention is made, BTW, of that son attempting to hire a replacement mother.