Yeah, I feel in general it develops in that way. More flexibility, less specialization. But I don't think it's really good though.
If you have a core set of skills and tasks you can often work very efficient. You know who to talk to, you know what to do, and if you spend time optimizing your work process after some time your daily life also is not too stressful. But if you always switch and hunt the opportunities you don't know much about anything. You always have to continue hunting.
But on the positive side I think it will be an option, at least in a foreseable future. Being flexible also means you cna say no to an opportunity if it is too far away from what you are usually doing. Of course that also requires more discipline than in the past.
Concerning money I think it depends on your talent/skills/education if it goes up or down. Talent becomes more rare when people do more different tasks (e.g. the "full stack devopser" can only know a little about web development, because there are so many other things he needs to know). And higher flexibility for employees means that companies have a harder time to keep talent. Therefore pay must go up for talent. But someone who barely gets by doing one job now has an even harder time doing 6 jobs at the same time, and he has a harder time to hide due to more responsibility on his side, and last but not least more flexibility also means companies don't need to keep you. Below the tipping point money goes down.
If one likes that or not probably depends on if oneself is above or below that tipping point. I can understand both sides here. No reason to discuss just the negative side.
Yes that is the elephant in the corner of the so-called "sharing" economy - who is paying their taxes, who is paying for the basic infrastructure that all these services piggyback on? You can't have Uber without well-maintained roads for example. You can't even have AirBnB without refuse collectors.
Of course, but if those working are efficient enough this can be supported. Once upon a time 99% of people were peasants and now we have the majority of the population providing non- essential services.
> majority of the population providing non- essential services.
'essentiality' doesn't come into the equation. Those who managed to amass a fortune being more efficient will want servants and other people to serve them (entertainers, sex workers, etc etc), which cannot easily be provided by machines. The economy will revert back to a fuedal one, where you become "owned" by the rich. Unless, of course, the people rebel, and bring on a socialist/communist form of gov't. I doubt that will happen though, becase the rich will see it coming, and nip it in the bud.
Why would the wants of the rich require a reversion to a feudal economy? Even if you have widespread basic income, the rich will have no trouble finding people wishing to earn more and willing to trade their time for that.
red doesn't sell well in the USA. We'll have full communism but we'll market it as something else. Probably still calling it the "free market capitalism". That's what we inaccurately call our current system and nobody blinks.
Most likely it'll roll out like public libraries / utilities. I already drive on government owned streets kept safe by government paid cops and clean by government paid trash pickup to visit the government owned library to use the government owned photocopier when I need to do legacy media stuff. Not a huge extension of the concept at the library to use the government owned 3d printer to make stuff or the government owned protein sequencer to make me soylent-tier food, maybe in 30 years.
The govt is a structure which answers to the people and is supposedly for the betterment of the people. The government exists only because you consent to be governed. At any given moment you can revoke that consent. This govt hasnt been looking out for the peoples interests in a long time.
Can you consider not needing to work at all? Let's imagine that machinery/robots can make all manpower obsolete. Why would you still need to work if everything could be provided without cost? Why would you need money at all? Couldn't you just lay back, relax and enjoy?
The answer is no, just because human nature doesn't like equality. Nothing more.
The answer is because the automation still costs money, and that, even if creating clothing was completely automated, the materials would still cost money, and as such, they'd still charge for the clothes. And unless you've got a job (or basic income, but I don't believe that's ever going to happen), you're not going to be able to pay for the clothes, no matter how cheap they are. Same with food. Even more so for housing.
Basic income without equality of income doesn't solve anything in the long run, it only allows those from the higher societal levels to feel good about themselves while patting each other on the back: "we took care of poverty!". And then, when inevitably people who live on basic income will "revolt", the higher ups will respond with the inevitable "why don't they eat cake?".
Thing is, is nice to not have to worry about putting food on the table, but it is less than nice when you see that you, your kids, your kids' kids etc will never be more than assisted babies (for a lack of a better expression), never having the opportunity to own an yacht, to have a private vacation villa on a Greek island or to book a trip to Mars come 2030. Humans are complicated.
It's more likely your kids will have no job, no health coverage and no prospects, and live by temporary employment (if they can find it), charity, begging and small cons, alongside tens of millions people whose work is not needed anymore in huge slums, next to highly guarded communities.
Kind of like it already is in Latin America, Egypt, Mexico, Indonesia and elsewhere for large swarms of people.
Strange that BlahBlah is made to seem so hot when ZimRide had to convert to Lyft to make any headway. I wonder if ZimRide overstepped their transition, or if BlahBlah executed better, or if Lyft is simply a richer pot.
What is interesting is that Lyft chases the taxis and BlahBlah chases the trains, or the other way around, depending on your loyalties.
Still, as the old adage goes, lots of people do have the same ideas around the same time. Winners are much more unique than that.
Maybe 'a job' is something that fitted a particular phase of our civilisation development and it just will fade away? A hunter gatherer (I bring this as my example - because as a species we spent most of our time in that phase) would do many things - but we would not call them jobs.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein
Maybe we wouldn't call them jobs and many people could have turned their hand to a lot of things that different people in the tribe did but returns to specialisation applies even at very low levels. I bet the best flint knappers spent more of their time practicing and thinking about their craft than the ones who did that and hunted as well.
Early for the game in the gig economy. Only dealing in extremely simple and trivial tasks like "Drive" or providing a place to sleep.
Much like the flint knapper gave way to unionized mechanized professional stone masons, 'uber for flint knappers' will likely give way to 'uber for professional stone masons' sooner or later.
Note that drivers, hostel workers, and flint knappers don't make much money because of supply and demand for the skill. Stone masons, however, make about 50% to 100% more than the median income, not as much as programmers, but not bad.
If "uber for" can scale to higher skill level tasks, which is an open question, then there's no need to assume the jobs will always be low skilled and low pay. The article avoids this issue. Its "well known" that only a small amount of the population live in architectural/geographical areas where they can become gig drivers, aside from anecdotes. Its possible 99% of professional stone masons will remain unaffected by an uber-for-stonemasons which only scales commodity style in incredibly fast growing wealthy cities and otherwise doesn't work.
'Job' is the input side to which "rent/mortgage" are outputs.
'Job' is about continuity and stability; the ability to make commitments to regular expenditures required to maintain a particular standard of living. Highly variable income is bad for this. That's one of the reasons why people push back so hard on the "gig economy"; it brings the fear that you might not be able to make rent/mortgage next month and therefore lose everything you've built up.
I usually work as a consultant and my income is highly variable. Of course in our field when I earn it's nothing to complain about, and my average for most years is certainly nothing to complain about. Financially, I'm lucky.
And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a savings account without knowing when it will be refilled is something that's always in the back of your mind, eating away at you. You build your life to fit an average yearly income - children, vehicles, rent, gym memberships, etc. When that average yearly income is NEVER guaranteed, you always suspect that this time you won't pull through, and your life will start falling apart, piece by little piece.
I can only imagine how brutal it must be for those whose skills are not as in demand or as remunerative as ours.
Someone always has to take the risks - when working for a company it is the company owners that take it. On average they probably are well compensated for it - but surely they must be more stressed. Or maybe when you are above some level you are not so stressed about the fluctuations - because you know that you'll not hit the bottom whatever happens?
That's what the privilege of wealth, especially hereditary wealth, is - freedom from having to worry about hitting the bottom.
And the higher up the scale you go, the less likely "company owner" is to be a single individual who only owns one company. It will be people or investment bodies with diversified portfolios. The most stressed person is probably the small business owner who is genuinely at risk if it fails.
The "precaritisation" is about pushing as much risk as possible onto those least able to bear it, reversing the expansion of risk-sharing that is the social insurance and the "welfare state".
I would also add that it's pushing risk on those who would avoid it if they could. As GP said, even if the company owners are the ones who would usually shoulder the risk - at least they signed up for it, and are possibly better suited to deal with it. They know what they walked into, they may have less attachments/dependents, they may get a thrill out of it.
Not many humans thrive under high-stakes insecurity. We'll have a pathological (and cruel) society if it's built on the pretense that everyone's an entrepreneurial whirlwind who gets a kick out of doing it without a safety net.
It will be the end of progress in civilisation I think, if we don't allow people to specialise. Although I think many people would be happy with that, or allow themselves to believe they would be.
>Maybe 'a job' is something that fitted a particular phase of our civilisation development and it just will fade away?
Maybe freedom was something that fitted a particular phase of our civilization development and it just will fade away?
Bear with me, I mean that's the way slave owners would have wanted slaves to think in the 18-19th century. And I think enterprises (job owners or salaried slave owners) always try to get away with paying as little as they can, and increasing their margins regarding salaries as much as they can -- which is were this pressure in jobs comes from.
Maybe not that much in the IT sector yet, but in most part of services and manufacturing, yes.
That has been going on since the dawn of IT. It is a red flag for a management team (or recruiter) that doesn't really know what they are in search of.
What's wrong with that? People in most jobs are expected to be able to do more than one thing. I much prefer to be allowed to do all that stuff rather than having to go through some bureaucratic / diplomatic process to get a widget added to my form or a field added to my table.
Admittedly it's nice to have a specialist on hand to fix things like gnarly css bugs if they arise.
Don't be scared of secondary requirements in ads as most often they don't require expertise in the mentioned area. During job interviews, "database specialist" "becomes" someone, who can write simple queries, "a web designer" - someone who can tinker CSS, "web development" - update Wordpress page etc.
I'm down with that. It just annoys me that managers or often agents expect you to be an expert. For instance i know oracle well and sql and pl/sql but i can also do some java, C, python, DBA, web development etc. My next role is at a startup and coming in as a data guy who will pick up some web services and javascript work seems totally acceptable.
I believe that "spreading yourself too thin" is a real thing, and a real disadvantage. In a theoretical world, you could have a specific specialization that you used in isolation for many different jobs simultaneously, but in reality, a "job" is about so much more than one individual skill. There is onboarding, learning the people and environment and tools and product that you work on, and a variety of other peripheral matters that require much of your time and learning curve before you get to apply the skill you've been hired to perform. And thus you end up with a lot of time spent on things that wouldn't be an issue if you concentrated on one job at a time for a decent period of time.
If you have in-demand skills then maybe the 'gig' economy can be a nice place to be: money and flexibility can create quite a nice lifestyle, if some comments I read on HN are to be believed.
But for those not in the top-layer its going to be "welcome to the precariat" [1]. Constant hustling, unpredictable income and housing, moving-on a lot, fewer social ties. For those at the bottom it's zero-hour contracts driving for Uber and stacking shelves at Amazon fulfilment centres.
Traditional full-time jobs provide a lot of the security necessary for long-term commitments like raising children, educating them properly (so that they in turn have sell-able skills), and engaging/participating in society. When almost everyone is chasing the next contract to pay the rent, the result can be a hollowed-out society where we all end-up poorer.
I often get the feeling that proponents of the gig economy underestimate just how transient their "in-demand skills" really are. A person's in-demand skills can only take them so far before someone else comes along with equal (or even better skills) and undercuts the "top-layer". At which point, instead of having the time to acquire new skills, the individual instead needs to devote their time to the "constant hustle" of finding the next gig before their reserves are depleted.
I totally agree with this. It creates amazing short-term opportunity for many, but possibly at large cost to society long-term.
I also find it interesting that the two examples you gave, Uber drivers and Amazon shelf stacking, are two that will certainly be fully automated in the next 5 - 10 years.
I watched my trash collection truck last week, it had just the driver, and a robotic arm that picked up each trash bin and emptied it. I was just thinking "and it's the driver next".
I agree on the negative impact to the society - just want to point out that there are not too many 'traditional full-time jobs' left. Most people I know in high tech -and increasingly other industries- change jobs every 2-3 years (not always voluntarily). These jobs are, in fact, gigs, just longer.
Personal anecdote: my dad used to work in a coal mine during the day, then drove a delivery truck in the evening, then during the weekend he worked at a local cafeteria, selling ice cream. He always thought I was being lazy not doing anything after coming home from my 9-5 job, and not having a second job on the weekend was almost sacrilegious. My point is that some people don't see the world the way this article describes them :P
One problem I can see in all this is that the trust networks that the sharing economy is built on are all (currently) privately owned and exploited, and network effects mean that it is very difficult for any competitor to get established in the same space because they have to establish their own competitor trust network. As a result the tendency will be for there to be a winner-takes-all outcome creating monopolies around the trust network in any particular vertical. See Facebook (network of trust around friendship), Uber (network of trust around giving/receiving transportation), Ebay (buying/selling goods), AirBnB (giving/receiving accommodation), Twitter (trusted sources of interesting opinions) etc. The only competitive strategy that seems to be working at the moment is having a vertical that is sufficiently different from the incumbent that you can attract existing users of the incumbent's network to use yours in parallel.
I doubt this is an outcome that governments and society in general will find acceptable when they start to recognise the pattern. Instead I wouldn't be surprised if the second phase of this economy involves government regulation of the trust networks, with them being extracted into some kind of trust infrastructure on which a number of competitor service providers are allowed to operate, or at least opened up so the trust network data has to be part of the public commons. At the moment the trust networks are (rightly) seen by the companies as being their most important asset - I think we'll eventually realise that, in the sharing economy, trust is so important that it cannot be privately owned.
>The only competitive strategy that seems to be working at the moment is having a vertical that is sufficiently different from the incumbent that you can attract existing users of the incumbent's network to use yours in parallel.
How is this any different than Coke building up a trusted brand over 100 years? If you want to compete in the drinks market, you need to find a different vertical (sports, energy, fruit, health, etc.) and build up your own trusted brand.
I think we'll see the government slowly coming around to endorse/oversee/standardize digital trust networks as they always have through the FTC, FDA, FCC, etc. They've already started with Title II of HIPAA in an attempt to regulate how data flows in the healthcare system so that patients can trust healthcare providers.
But do we really need to oversee/nationalize a social network/content aggregator such as Linkedin or Facebook?
Pepsi is to Coke as Google + is to Facebook. They both have overlapping networks of drinkers/users that are not mutually exclusive. Facebook was able to get to market first and provide a tastier product. But the free market supports both products/networks. And there is more room for disruption in the Facebook/Google Plus space than the soft drinks market due to much shorter product lifecycles. Myspace lasted 5 years. Facebook will last longer due to strong tie-ins w/ businesses, schools, organizations, etc. but I, like many of my friends, have dropped it and are keeping an eye out for the next thing.
The issue w/ Uber and Lyft is one of employment laws rather than regulated trust networks. If we changed the laws/prosecuted the companies they would have to raise prices due to higher employee wages/compensation which would have the ultimate effect of weakening the network as people looked at taxis and public transport as viable alternatives.
So ultimately my point is that we should look at how attractive the service and why. In the case of Uber its because they are able to exploit an oversupply of low skill labor to bring prices down. This combined w/ advertising and promotions has created a strong network. Not sure it's the govs job to step in and weaken/nationalize that network. Perhaps regulate the employee/employer relationship, but this is nothing new.
Not necessarily. Pepsi and Coke have both built quite legal relationships with a number of institutions like universities and fast food chains with the agreement that competitor products are not served. My university was a "pepsi campus", you couldn't buy coke products anywhere on campus. This is why people have to ask "do you serve coke or pepsi?" at restaurants. Of course this has far fewer effects that social network tie-ins, but its not a new idea.
> How is this any different than Coke building up a trusted brand over 100 years? If you want to compete in the drinks market, you need to find a different vertical (sports, energy, fruit, health, etc.) and build up your own trusted brand.
The trust relationship with a brand is a direct and personal relationship, and people can change their idea of trust at little cost. People can choose to drink Pepsi without having to convince their friends/business associates/renters/drivers/etc to also drink Pepsi. The same is not true in a market which is built on a network of trust. If I want to rent out space in my car to people I go to the provider with the biggest trust network because that's the biggest market. I can choose to join a new startup's competitor network as well, but there's little I (or the startup) can do to convince everyone else on the competitor's network to join too. And, crucially, if the people I want to offer rides to aren't on the competitor's network, my participation in the network has less value.
> But do we really need to oversee/nationalize a social network/content aggregator such as Linkedin or Facebook?
It depends how comfortable we all are with the private monopolies that seem to be the outcome of the way the economics play out at the moment. If everyone is happy being a freelancer working for multiple multinational trust network monopolies, then maybe not. But if the relationship between the individual and the network are exploitative (some recent articles about the reality of driving for Uber take this line) then I can imagine people calling for some kind of regulation to break the monopoly and restore some kind of competition in the market. At least if there are multiple Uber's operating on a shared trust network, drivers (and passengers) have some choice over where they take their business, for example.
Capitalism is about the flow of capital. Most people don't have capital, so they have to trade their labor for a small amount with people that do have capital, who are only trading it to get more capital.
Articles like this assume that everything will change - except how capital works.
Bitcoin. Crowdfunding. Distributed banking. Mass market barter transactions.
I can't help but think that centralized stores of capital (i.e. the top layer, the rich, the capitalist, etc etc) are naturally going to become obsolete.
Which is why I find the "base income" suggestions so prevalent in this thread somewhat disturbing. The government is more likely to exacerbate this problem than solve it.
As a proponent of a universal income, I think that's where a lot of the debate fizzles out, and rightly so. Developing a UBI within the status quo framework of centralized government and the dollar (another highly centralized social institution) would be misguided and would completely inhibit the potential of such a system. A real UBI would be a distributed network, which is incompatible with such highly centralized systems.
I'd recommend Critical Path and Grunch of Giants by Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). Fuller was the former president of the Mensa society and claimed that a universal income became technically feasible in the 1970's.
>World Game makes it clear that the world electrical systems' energy-network integration and its comprehensive powering of automated, special case machinery would most effectively counter the peril of overspecialization of the humans and would introduce the omni-Universe-operative, time-energy, kilowatt-hours-per-year, commonwealth accounting system. This cosmic accounting will computer-establish the up-to-the-moment-realized cosmic-energy-income-harnessing thus far accomplished; and the technical-efficiency levels attained in the various energy-employing technologies operative around the world; and the resultant per capita individually employable world commonwealth facilities; and the per capita "consumable," "employable," and "enjoyable" "credits" in respect to any specific consumables, commodities, services, conveniences, or tools as manifest on the satellite-relay-integrated world computers and as individually called for and read out on each individual's electronic computer "credit card." The individually available information will govern the individual's design science choices of the highest relative-efficiency systems to be employed. It will also tell people whether they can do this or that, and if so, how they can go most swiftly— for instance, from New York to Australia—and will "book" a travel reservation and will prepay the bill for the travel accommodation. All such in- formation is continually computer-integrated to produce the commonwealth evaluations and their read-out-ability on world-individual's pocket-computer "credit card." These will always register the world individual's share of the ever-increasingly-employable technological savings reserves and their respective technologically operative capabilities. With humanity employing such a world-around, satellite-relayed, and world-integrated computer accounting system, the world can, overnight, physically realize the "Omnibillionaire Commonwealth" of its humans.
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
This is where "r > g" and Picketty's work is relevant. The rate of return on capital matters. Centralised capital earning a return will always pull ahead of small-scale capital unless there's enough regulatory and other handicapping to the advantage of the small capital investment.
Can decentralised capital get a better rate of return than centralised capital? If so, centralised capital can just invest in it. If not, you'll end up paying your decentralised returns back and more in rent. Property is the ultimate centralised store of capital.
If not, you'll end up paying your decentralised returns back and more in rent. Property is the ultimate centralised store of capital.
I think this would assume that decentralized investments won't be able to afford autonomous, off-the-grid living arrangements. There's still a whole lot more land out there than we need. And it wouldn't need to support everyone, just enough so that there's an alternative to keep rents from skyrocketing.
Anything else you pay for can be decentralized, as the article demonstrates.
There's still a whole lot more land out there than we need
You can't be serious - there isn't any unowned land out there. Certainly not in the western world. Sure, in the Americas you can squat on government land for a while and hope nobody notices, but that involves being miles away from anywhere and if you're off the grid it seriously hampers your earning potential.
In the UK there is simply nowhere you can do this.
You can't be serious - there isn't any unowned land out there.
You can buy land for less than $2,000 per acre in just about every inland state in the US. A cursory glance at Zillow shows that even Rhode Island has sub-$100k/acre available[1].
But that involves being miles away from anywhere and if you're off the grid it seriously hampers your earning potential.
I'll concede that we're not there yet, but technology makes off-the-grid living and working more feasible all the time.
Microchip fabs?
You mean like Intel? A company with 1800 owners?[2]
But without getting to boiled down in the minutia, my problem with Picketty is that there's no reason that the "r" in "r > g" couldn't be distributed using crowd-funding and decentralized currencies (and whatever their successors might be) by the natural flow of capital, rather than relying on the coercive methods Picketty suggests.
> it seems strange to me that we would always recommend to companies that their revenue streams are diverse, yet for individuals, the smallest and most fragile economic unit, we say: you must only do one thing all your life. What a crazy way to live; 87% of people in full-time employment are not passionate about what they do. When I look at this new way of work, I think of it as opt-in. It gives people economic agency, it puts them in charge. And it gives them flexibility. People love those things.
I don't think people love these things as much as they love security, at least in the long term.
Every generation goes through this. Journalists act like Millennials are special people who won't be held to a 9-to-5 job like everyone before them, but they've made the same mistake as journalists who covered previous generations. Before these "gig economy" Millennials, we had "hippie" Baby Boomers and "slacker" Gen-Xers.
Young people of every generation are always going to say they don't want to live a traditional life like their parents, that they're going to chase their dreams and be genuinely different, and they join whatever the latest counterculture is. But, ultimately, they come back.
The hippies of the '60s and '70s became the yuppies of the '80s and the soccer moms of the '90s. Why? They want that sweet, sweet security. A boring job with a steady paycheck and loads of benefits means you don't have to worry about anything, as long as you come to work every day and don't spectacularly fuck up at your job. If you're planning to start a family, then you need the stability for your kids. If you're not, then the stability helps fund your life so you can spend the weekend enjoying your hobbies instead of worrying where your next meal is coming from.
Mark my words, in a decade the "gig economy" rumspringa will be over, and most of those people who chose to bounce from gig to gig for "flexibility" will be working in cube farms so their kids can have health insurance and go to good schools (and those of us without kids will be doing the same thing so we can indulge in expensive hobbies on evenings and weekends).
Oh, of course there will be holdouts, just like there are still hippies who live on communes well into their 60s, but by and large the gig economy will fade away once most of the original participants are out of their 20s, and pop culture will treat the "aging Millenial hipster" as a joke just like the "aging hippie" is treated now. And, of course, we'll see the beginnings of the next rumspringa as the next generation of young people decide they don't want to be like their parents... until they do.
Let's hope the "gig economy" people will actually be able to get a safe cubicle job in a decade. To me it looks like this option is systematically being eroded. Pensions are gone and I think steady employment for good salary will slowly go away too. And the node.js hotshots who think there will always be high paying jobs for coders like them should have gone through 2000. The fall can be quick and deep.
+1 for The Guardian article and this discussion thread. I see the automation and replacement of jobs as one of the central problems.
I am mostly retired now so I spend more time mentoring (mostly) young people on CS tech, job market, choosing a career path, etc. Two common lines of dialog are what tech they have a passion for and the other is what tech is least likely to be automated. I may be optimistic in that I hope that a life process/system of continuous education and keeping in mind what types of work help society the most will see the younger generations through some 'interesting' times.
The statement “My father had one job in his lifetime, I will have six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.” makes a pithy statement but is generally not true.
My father had about 6 jobs in his working life. Looking at my uncles they varied in the number of jobs but none of them had just one, over a working life of more than 40 years each. Thinking wider still, I cannot think of a single person in my parents generation that had just one job.
It might be that people average more jobs today than they did in the past. Maybe you can project that forward and guess that a future generation will average more. But to say 6 concurrently is wild speculation and hard for me to take seriously.
There is no reason to think our children will have many concurrent jobs. Certainly no more than people do today.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 52.8 ms ] threadIf you have a core set of skills and tasks you can often work very efficient. You know who to talk to, you know what to do, and if you spend time optimizing your work process after some time your daily life also is not too stressful. But if you always switch and hunt the opportunities you don't know much about anything. You always have to continue hunting.
But on the positive side I think it will be an option, at least in a foreseable future. Being flexible also means you cna say no to an opportunity if it is too far away from what you are usually doing. Of course that also requires more discipline than in the past.
Concerning money I think it depends on your talent/skills/education if it goes up or down. Talent becomes more rare when people do more different tasks (e.g. the "full stack devopser" can only know a little about web development, because there are so many other things he needs to know). And higher flexibility for employees means that companies have a harder time to keep talent. Therefore pay must go up for talent. But someone who barely gets by doing one job now has an even harder time doing 6 jobs at the same time, and he has a harder time to hide due to more responsibility on his side, and last but not least more flexibility also means companies don't need to keep you. Below the tipping point money goes down.
If one likes that or not probably depends on if oneself is above or below that tipping point. I can understand both sides here. No reason to discuss just the negative side.
'essentiality' doesn't come into the equation. Those who managed to amass a fortune being more efficient will want servants and other people to serve them (entertainers, sex workers, etc etc), which cannot easily be provided by machines. The economy will revert back to a fuedal one, where you become "owned" by the rich. Unless, of course, the people rebel, and bring on a socialist/communist form of gov't. I doubt that will happen though, becase the rich will see it coming, and nip it in the bud.
What if the future is red?
So let's hope we don't go down that road.
Most likely it'll roll out like public libraries / utilities. I already drive on government owned streets kept safe by government paid cops and clean by government paid trash pickup to visit the government owned library to use the government owned photocopier when I need to do legacy media stuff. Not a huge extension of the concept at the library to use the government owned 3d printer to make stuff or the government owned protein sequencer to make me soylent-tier food, maybe in 30 years.
Not the govt.
The govt owns nothing nor employees anyone.
Thing is, is nice to not have to worry about putting food on the table, but it is less than nice when you see that you, your kids, your kids' kids etc will never be more than assisted babies (for a lack of a better expression), never having the opportunity to own an yacht, to have a private vacation villa on a Greek island or to book a trip to Mars come 2030. Humans are complicated.
Kind of like it already is in Latin America, Egypt, Mexico, Indonesia and elsewhere for large swarms of people.
What is interesting is that Lyft chases the taxis and BlahBlah chases the trains, or the other way around, depending on your loyalties.
Still, as the old adage goes, lots of people do have the same ideas around the same time. Winners are much more unique than that.
Much like the flint knapper gave way to unionized mechanized professional stone masons, 'uber for flint knappers' will likely give way to 'uber for professional stone masons' sooner or later.
Note that drivers, hostel workers, and flint knappers don't make much money because of supply and demand for the skill. Stone masons, however, make about 50% to 100% more than the median income, not as much as programmers, but not bad.
If "uber for" can scale to higher skill level tasks, which is an open question, then there's no need to assume the jobs will always be low skilled and low pay. The article avoids this issue. Its "well known" that only a small amount of the population live in architectural/geographical areas where they can become gig drivers, aside from anecdotes. Its possible 99% of professional stone masons will remain unaffected by an uber-for-stonemasons which only scales commodity style in incredibly fast growing wealthy cities and otherwise doesn't work.
'Job' is about continuity and stability; the ability to make commitments to regular expenditures required to maintain a particular standard of living. Highly variable income is bad for this. That's one of the reasons why people push back so hard on the "gig economy"; it brings the fear that you might not be able to make rent/mortgage next month and therefore lose everything you've built up.
And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a savings account without knowing when it will be refilled is something that's always in the back of your mind, eating away at you. You build your life to fit an average yearly income - children, vehicles, rent, gym memberships, etc. When that average yearly income is NEVER guaranteed, you always suspect that this time you won't pull through, and your life will start falling apart, piece by little piece.
I can only imagine how brutal it must be for those whose skills are not as in demand or as remunerative as ours.
And the higher up the scale you go, the less likely "company owner" is to be a single individual who only owns one company. It will be people or investment bodies with diversified portfolios. The most stressed person is probably the small business owner who is genuinely at risk if it fails.
The "precaritisation" is about pushing as much risk as possible onto those least able to bear it, reversing the expansion of risk-sharing that is the social insurance and the "welfare state".
Not many humans thrive under high-stakes insecurity. We'll have a pathological (and cruel) society if it's built on the pretense that everyone's an entrepreneurial whirlwind who gets a kick out of doing it without a safety net.
Maybe freedom was something that fitted a particular phase of our civilization development and it just will fade away?
Bear with me, I mean that's the way slave owners would have wanted slaves to think in the 18-19th century. And I think enterprises (job owners or salaried slave owners) always try to get away with paying as little as they can, and increasing their margins regarding salaries as much as they can -- which is were this pressure in jobs comes from.
Maybe not that much in the IT sector yet, but in most part of services and manufacturing, yes.
Admittedly it's nice to have a specialist on hand to fix things like gnarly css bugs if they arise.
Expertise no. But they DO require you to DO the job.
But for those not in the top-layer its going to be "welcome to the precariat" [1]. Constant hustling, unpredictable income and housing, moving-on a lot, fewer social ties. For those at the bottom it's zero-hour contracts driving for Uber and stacking shelves at Amazon fulfilment centres.
Traditional full-time jobs provide a lot of the security necessary for long-term commitments like raising children, educating them properly (so that they in turn have sell-able skills), and engaging/participating in society. When almost everyone is chasing the next contract to pay the rent, the result can be a hollowed-out society where we all end-up poorer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
I also find it interesting that the two examples you gave, Uber drivers and Amazon shelf stacking, are two that will certainly be fully automated in the next 5 - 10 years.
I watched my trash collection truck last week, it had just the driver, and a robotic arm that picked up each trash bin and emptied it. I was just thinking "and it's the driver next".
I doubt this is an outcome that governments and society in general will find acceptable when they start to recognise the pattern. Instead I wouldn't be surprised if the second phase of this economy involves government regulation of the trust networks, with them being extracted into some kind of trust infrastructure on which a number of competitor service providers are allowed to operate, or at least opened up so the trust network data has to be part of the public commons. At the moment the trust networks are (rightly) seen by the companies as being their most important asset - I think we'll eventually realise that, in the sharing economy, trust is so important that it cannot be privately owned.
Looking at what is happening elsewhere with ownership laws, I'm doubting this will be anytime in the near future.
How is this any different than Coke building up a trusted brand over 100 years? If you want to compete in the drinks market, you need to find a different vertical (sports, energy, fruit, health, etc.) and build up your own trusted brand.
I think we'll see the government slowly coming around to endorse/oversee/standardize digital trust networks as they always have through the FTC, FDA, FCC, etc. They've already started with Title II of HIPAA in an attempt to regulate how data flows in the healthcare system so that patients can trust healthcare providers.
But do we really need to oversee/nationalize a social network/content aggregator such as Linkedin or Facebook?
It doesn't work quite as well to use a different, say, social media platform, when all my friends are on Facebook.
The issue w/ Uber and Lyft is one of employment laws rather than regulated trust networks. If we changed the laws/prosecuted the companies they would have to raise prices due to higher employee wages/compensation which would have the ultimate effect of weakening the network as people looked at taxis and public transport as viable alternatives.
So ultimately my point is that we should look at how attractive the service and why. In the case of Uber its because they are able to exploit an oversupply of low skill labor to bring prices down. This combined w/ advertising and promotions has created a strong network. Not sure it's the govs job to step in and weaken/nationalize that network. Perhaps regulate the employee/employer relationship, but this is nothing new.
OT, but this is why news anchors have to say "the obesity rate in the US has risen to its highest level ever, scientists reported today."
The trust relationship with a brand is a direct and personal relationship, and people can change their idea of trust at little cost. People can choose to drink Pepsi without having to convince their friends/business associates/renters/drivers/etc to also drink Pepsi. The same is not true in a market which is built on a network of trust. If I want to rent out space in my car to people I go to the provider with the biggest trust network because that's the biggest market. I can choose to join a new startup's competitor network as well, but there's little I (or the startup) can do to convince everyone else on the competitor's network to join too. And, crucially, if the people I want to offer rides to aren't on the competitor's network, my participation in the network has less value.
> But do we really need to oversee/nationalize a social network/content aggregator such as Linkedin or Facebook?
It depends how comfortable we all are with the private monopolies that seem to be the outcome of the way the economics play out at the moment. If everyone is happy being a freelancer working for multiple multinational trust network monopolies, then maybe not. But if the relationship between the individual and the network are exploitative (some recent articles about the reality of driving for Uber take this line) then I can imagine people calling for some kind of regulation to break the monopoly and restore some kind of competition in the market. At least if there are multiple Uber's operating on a shared trust network, drivers (and passengers) have some choice over where they take their business, for example.
Articles like this assume that everything will change - except how capital works.
Bitcoin. Crowdfunding. Distributed banking. Mass market barter transactions.
I can't help but think that centralized stores of capital (i.e. the top layer, the rich, the capitalist, etc etc) are naturally going to become obsolete.
Unless, of course, they're kept alive by force.
Which has increasingly been the case since the 70's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout#Cases
Critical Path:
http://www.btronics.com/files/R.%20Buckminster%20Fuller%20-%...
>World Game makes it clear that the world electrical systems' energy-network integration and its comprehensive powering of automated, special case machinery would most effectively counter the peril of overspecialization of the humans and would introduce the omni-Universe-operative, time-energy, kilowatt-hours-per-year, commonwealth accounting system. This cosmic accounting will computer-establish the up-to-the-moment-realized cosmic-energy-income-harnessing thus far accomplished; and the technical-efficiency levels attained in the various energy-employing technologies operative around the world; and the resultant per capita individually employable world commonwealth facilities; and the per capita "consumable," "employable," and "enjoyable" "credits" in respect to any specific consumables, commodities, services, conveniences, or tools as manifest on the satellite-relay-integrated world computers and as individually called for and read out on each individual's electronic computer "credit card." The individually available information will govern the individual's design science choices of the highest relative-efficiency systems to be employed. It will also tell people whether they can do this or that, and if so, how they can go most swiftly— for instance, from New York to Australia—and will "book" a travel reservation and will prepay the bill for the travel accommodation. All such in- formation is continually computer-integrated to produce the commonwealth evaluations and their read-out-ability on world-individual's pocket-computer "credit card." These will always register the world individual's share of the ever-increasingly-employable technological savings reserves and their respective technologically operative capabilities. With humanity employing such a world-around, satellite-relayed, and world-integrated computer accounting system, the world can, overnight, physically realize the "Omnibillionaire Commonwealth" of its humans.
Grunch of Giants:
https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/grunch-of-giants.pdf
>There exists a realizable, evolutionary alternative to our being either atom-bombed into extinction or crowding ourselves off the planet. The alternative is the computer-persuadable veering of big business from its weaponry fixation to accommodation of all humanity at an aerospace level of technology, with the vastly larger, far more enduringly profitable for all, entirely new World Livingry Service Industry. It is statistically evident that the more advanced the living standard, the lower the birth rate.
Can decentralised capital get a better rate of return than centralised capital? If so, centralised capital can just invest in it. If not, you'll end up paying your decentralised returns back and more in rent. Property is the ultimate centralised store of capital.
I think this would assume that decentralized investments won't be able to afford autonomous, off-the-grid living arrangements. There's still a whole lot more land out there than we need. And it wouldn't need to support everyone, just enough so that there's an alternative to keep rents from skyrocketing.
Anything else you pay for can be decentralized, as the article demonstrates.
You can't be serious - there isn't any unowned land out there. Certainly not in the western world. Sure, in the Americas you can squat on government land for a while and hope nobody notices, but that involves being miles away from anywhere and if you're off the grid it seriously hampers your earning potential.
In the UK there is simply nowhere you can do this.
Anything else you pay for can be decentralized
Microchip fabs?
You can buy land for less than $2,000 per acre in just about every inland state in the US. A cursory glance at Zillow shows that even Rhode Island has sub-$100k/acre available[1].
But that involves being miles away from anywhere and if you're off the grid it seriously hampers your earning potential.
I'll concede that we're not there yet, but technology makes off-the-grid living and working more feasible all the time.
Microchip fabs?
You mean like Intel? A company with 1800 owners?[2]
But without getting to boiled down in the minutia, my problem with Picketty is that there's no reason that the "r" in "r > g" couldn't be distributed using crowd-funding and decentralized currencies (and whatever their successors might be) by the natural flow of capital, rather than relying on the coercive methods Picketty suggests.
[1]http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/RI/land_type/50_rid/2-_... [2]http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/intc/ownership-summary
I don't think people love these things as much as they love security, at least in the long term.
Every generation goes through this. Journalists act like Millennials are special people who won't be held to a 9-to-5 job like everyone before them, but they've made the same mistake as journalists who covered previous generations. Before these "gig economy" Millennials, we had "hippie" Baby Boomers and "slacker" Gen-Xers.
Young people of every generation are always going to say they don't want to live a traditional life like their parents, that they're going to chase their dreams and be genuinely different, and they join whatever the latest counterculture is. But, ultimately, they come back.
The hippies of the '60s and '70s became the yuppies of the '80s and the soccer moms of the '90s. Why? They want that sweet, sweet security. A boring job with a steady paycheck and loads of benefits means you don't have to worry about anything, as long as you come to work every day and don't spectacularly fuck up at your job. If you're planning to start a family, then you need the stability for your kids. If you're not, then the stability helps fund your life so you can spend the weekend enjoying your hobbies instead of worrying where your next meal is coming from.
Mark my words, in a decade the "gig economy" rumspringa will be over, and most of those people who chose to bounce from gig to gig for "flexibility" will be working in cube farms so their kids can have health insurance and go to good schools (and those of us without kids will be doing the same thing so we can indulge in expensive hobbies on evenings and weekends).
Oh, of course there will be holdouts, just like there are still hippies who live on communes well into their 60s, but by and large the gig economy will fade away once most of the original participants are out of their 20s, and pop culture will treat the "aging Millenial hipster" as a joke just like the "aging hippie" is treated now. And, of course, we'll see the beginnings of the next rumspringa as the next generation of young people decide they don't want to be like their parents... until they do.
I am mostly retired now so I spend more time mentoring (mostly) young people on CS tech, job market, choosing a career path, etc. Two common lines of dialog are what tech they have a passion for and the other is what tech is least likely to be automated. I may be optimistic in that I hope that a life process/system of continuous education and keeping in mind what types of work help society the most will see the younger generations through some 'interesting' times.
My father had about 6 jobs in his working life. Looking at my uncles they varied in the number of jobs but none of them had just one, over a working life of more than 40 years each. Thinking wider still, I cannot think of a single person in my parents generation that had just one job.
It might be that people average more jobs today than they did in the past. Maybe you can project that forward and guess that a future generation will average more. But to say 6 concurrently is wild speculation and hard for me to take seriously.
There is no reason to think our children will have many concurrent jobs. Certainly no more than people do today.