Automation
Within fifteen years, driverless cars will begin to take over our roads. They will eliminate taxicab drivers and may wipeout the need to have your own car. But this near future is not isolated to automobiles. Automation will be in our kitchens, grocery stores, coffee shops, bars, and hospitals. They will start pouring us beers. They’ll be handling our packages. And with little human interaction, they will build our homes. There is no limit to our creativity for how we can replace low-skill labor with a robot. As exciting as this future sounds, there are serious implications. Employment.
During our last great economic transformation, industrialization allowed society to focus on higher-skilled occupational fields, such as finance, medicine, and engineering. Our world adapted from primarily agricultural employment to mainly a service-based economy. But automation will bring a paradigm shift in humanity when little work will be required of us to sustain our basic needs. If we do not experience fundamental economic changes, rampant unemployment may soon follow. Basic income does provide some relief in our current system, but it ignores the growth and nurturing of an individual. As a society, we need to decide if we want our children to live in a feudal future of haves and have nots or a world where we can unconditionally provide food, water, shelter, a world-class education, and an opportunity to every person and child. If society wants to avoid a violent clash, it needs to begin utilizing the power of our communities.
Crowd Voting
Since the mass expansion of the Internet during the early 2000s, people have been engaged in each other’s likes, interests, and opinions. Until recently, the right tools weren’t available to utilize these pieces of data. Bandwidth was expensive. Graphics weren’t exactly the most attractive. And it was tough to go viral in chat rooms. But we got better at everything. Running a website became cheap. Massive social networks made it easier to spread information. The Internet now is clean, pretty, and approachable. With the help of these improvements and a little math, many consumer industries can embrace user-driven crowd voting networks.
In the same vein as crowdsourcing, crowd voting allows for a community to centrally gather and utilize reviews of a product. Replacing its current existence as supplemental info, reviews are at the core of a crowd voted marketplace. Brands can rely on a marketplace to promote its product solely on merit. Users can be guaranteed of a marketplace without the advertisement of inferior brands. Crowd voting empowers an amateur with few resources to have immediate exposure to all potential consumers. Removing third-party distributors releases a producer from region and licensing issues. With capitalist motivation retained, crowd voting allows producers to shift resources from advertising and sales to employment and innovation.
Certain characteristics help the viability of a product sector to be effectively crowd voted.
- Short satiation periods. I instantly know if I have a decent cup of coffee. I still don’t know if my 14 year-old refrigerator is decent.
- Digital consumption. Music, movies, video games, and podcasts are ideal candidates in the digital hemisphere.
- High competition/low barrier to entry. Any grown man can get into the chocolate chip cookie game from his kitchen, but making superconductors in a garage is going to be difficult.
- Function over fashion. I couldn’t care less about the color of my laundry detergent.
With billions connected to the Internet, a marketplace can comfortably find voluntary participation for product voting. Voting can be accomplished in different ways, though product testing is most effective when incorporating random fashion. Verified user systems may be implemented to supplement expertise and prevent deception. A network effect is typically necessary for a marketplace launch; producers won’t use a marketplace that has no users, and vice versa. With the help of social networks, including Reddit, a marketplace can effectively direct their message to their target population for a launch. As competing marketplaces are likely to use similar statistical methods, one would typically differentiate through design and the maximum allowable incentives. Incentives for producers include profit sharing and the retention of product rights. Various types of services may also be crowd voted, though would typically require more creative logistics than consumer products.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Jane’s been reading books her entire life. Lately, she’s been disappointed with a few from her favorite bestseller list. Jane learns those books are promoted through various distribution channels and are not necessarily well-written books. Jane figures she can find the best, new books by handing them out to the people willing to participate and asking them to share their opinion. Poorly-rated books can be identified quickly, leaving her with only the best ones. For the user, she can organize the books by genre, difficulty level, and length of book, among other possibilities. She can also afford to give a majority of the profits to writers as her marketplace will be driven by the community, with participation from readers like her. This gives writers the opportunity to focus on their creativity and leaves the entire process of exposure and distribution to Jane. By promoting her platform to r/Books and other social networks, Jane’s user-focused bookstore has become the Reddit of books.
The societal effects of crowd voted marketplaces cannot be overlooked. Allowing producers to exclusively focus on quality lowers the barrier to entry, increasing the participation of industry creation and employment. The shift of profits from third-party distributors to producers triggers a natural redistribution of wealth. Crowd voting effectively hands the control of the means of distribution to communities. When the public can command distribution and cash flow, it can better allocate resources to its communities along with a larger presence in their government. In contrast to private ownership, society has no agenda other than the growth and care of its citizens and community. However, before society can take advantage of these resources, it will need to begin creating systems that utilize its people and the Internet.
The Quiet Revolution
Where in the world do you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?
Milton Friedman pondered this after being questioned about capitalism. He was unapologetically realistic. We don’t work in a system that showers people who fight for our rights – for peace, for health, for education, for privacy – these are not virtues we reward in capitalism. However, our free enterprise system is simply the most effective we have. It is largely driven by our greed. And greed is good, it absolutely is. It inspires thinkers and fuels innovation. But our empowerment of technology will soon change this world in ways we cannot currently understand. Among futurists, the discussion about low-skill jobs rendering obsolete is not about if it will happen, but when it will happen. With it may come extreme wealth inequality unlike we’ve ever seen. With a financial backbone in crowd voting networks, an upgrade to our communities can help mature humanity out of its infancy.
There are issues in this world that we, as individuals, simply have little to no influence. Politics. Law enforcement. Military. National security. Government spending. Foreign policy. Instead, we need focus on the issues that communities can impact. Without a doubt, there is someone who knows how to effectively get food into the hands of the hungry. How to rebuild schools for troubled neighborhoods. How to get proper medical care for the less fortunate. How to give shelter for those without a roof. How to improve elderly living. The list is endless. Similar to how Jobs changed the way we interact with our phones, we now need a change in how people interact with their communities. With a focus on design and logistics, decentralized systems can help connect a community and complete projects with efficiency and satisfaction. Mobile apps have transformed our consumption habits; millions of people rely on Uber/Lyft because they made the experience safe, affordable, efficient, and easy to participate. We now desperately need those same design features in systems that can help society.
We’ll take another look at an example.
Carl lives in Manhattan. There have been numerous recent robberies where he lives and few arrests have been made. Carl brainstorms about how a neighborhood watch would work. He believes he can make a simple & user-focused app and sell its services to cities. His plans include an 8-hour neighborhood watch during the late evening and early morning hours. Carl estimates the city would need to employ ~85 people for one square mile. With an area of ~23 square miles at a rate of $15/hr, the city can service Manhattan for ~$86M per year -- a drop in the bucket for a city running a $75B budget. His community can also employ a volunteer approach to further reduce costs. With a full implementation in Manhattan, residents enjoy a safe nightlife and other positive effects from a secure neighborhood.
Capitalism and advertising are brilliant achievements that have sustained our world for hundreds of years. It’s brought iPhones into our hands and Big Gulps in our tummies. But like anything, it has its faults. Severe wealth inequality will reveal our ugliest face. Do we continue to lie to ourselves with the rhetoric of society’s self-improvement? The answer to Mr. Friedman’s question is simple. It’s the logicians, the developers, and the designers here on Reddit who have a deep understanding of our issues. It’s people like Jimmy Wales who made general knowledge free, simple, and organized. It’s the few that can paint a vision for the rest of us. The transition to a post-scarcity humanity can be one that takes a bloody or a peaceful route. On the verge of automation, only we can change how we treat the world and, more importantly, how we treat each other.
Submitted October 07, 2015 at 08:25PM by tolltroll25 http://ift.tt/1LiaeV1 Futurology
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