Future of work

As we move into a new way of work - one based on more fluid and looser connections, grounded in freethinking, humanist and scientific approaches to the social contract - it's becoming clear that the traditional model of "collaboration tools" is based arou

"Imagine a corporation that engages in economic activity without guidance or direction from humans. Programmed with a mission statement-maximize profit for shareholders from the sale of widgets, for example-the corporation could own capital, enter contracts, and employ robots. People could even be hired for more creative tasks. Such an entity would live on the Internet, distributed across thousands or millions of nodes (stakeholders who host the DAC on their computer). DACs hold the potential to reduce friction in many markets, allowing for instantaneous, trust-less business transactions across the globe. Near-term applications of the DACs concept include peer-to-peer bond and stock trading, verifiable-yet-anonymous voting, and decentralised currency exchange. A DAC also wouldn't have to employ a board of directors, and a CEO's hefty pay cheque could be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends."

"After nearly a half-century of digital technology advancement -- fueled by years of steady exponential gains from potent digital growth factors like Moore's Law and Gilder's Law -- businesses are still at the crossroads when it comes to applying technology to their business. Despite decades of largely automating existing processes instead of fundamentally rethinking what they do in digital terms, our organizations are now facing a horde of native digital 'gazelles' -- and now a growing bow wave of collaborative economy startups -- that are threatening not just disruption, but even potential elimination altogether."

"In The Nature Of The Future: Dispatches From The Socialstructed World, Marina Gorbis argues we are moving away from the depersonalized world of institutional production toward a new economy built on social connections and rewards--a process she calls socialstructing. Along with the exciting opportunities to create new kinds of social organizations--systems for producing not merely goods but also meaning, purpose, and greater good--there is a possibility that this form of creation will bring new challenges, new inequities, and new opportunities for abuse. We need to understand the potential disadvantages of socialstructing as well, if we are to minimize the potential pitfalls. The following is an excerpt from the book, available April 9."

"Now the zero-marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors. The precipitating agent is an emerging general-purpose technology platform - the internet of things. The convergence of the communications internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics internet in a smart, inter-operable internet-of-things system is giving rise to a third industrial revolution."

"Machines are about to change what it means to be human. According to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, they will undermine our sense of private property, take away our jobs and turn us into free agents in a new global "sharing economy". For good measure, they will also destroy capitalism before the middle of the 21st century."

"The problem isn't just the machines, however; it's what machines do to thinking. In his book, "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans," Mr. Head bemoans a triumph of computer-led systems thinking and so-called "scientific management." These have led to "misindustrialization," he writes, in which service workers' emotions are manipulated to optimize retail sales, and Oxford dons are judged by a "research excellence framework" that compels them to publish nonsense to meet irrelevant standards."

"Taxi unions say government regulation is essential to "safeguard" the public from itself The U.S. isn't exactly a "free market" at times, with outright bribery -- condoned by the U.S. judicial system -- or collusive public-private cartels leading to some products and services being banned from the market.  Just ask Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) whose electric vehicles have been banned from sale in many states.  That debacle arose due to the fact that Tesla has no dealerships and fearful dealership lobbyists banded together to pay off state politicians to ban direct auto sales."

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (The Web at 25). A February 2014 report from Pew Internet Project tied to the Web's anniversary looked at the strikingly fast adoption of the Internet. It also looked at the generally positive attitudes users have about its role in their social environment. A March 2014 Digital Life in 2025 report issued by Pew Internet Project in association with Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center looked at the Internet's future. Some 1,867 experts and stakeholders responded to an open-ended question about the future of the Internet by 2025. They said it would become so deeply part of the environment that it would become "like electricity"-less visible even as it becomes more important in people's daily lives.

"Talking about the future of work, says Canterbury University wearable computing expert Professor Mark Billinghurst, remember when there was a girls' typing class at school? Ah yes, 3Gen clattering away on heavy upright typewriters between classes on Pitman shorthand and bookkeeping. The nation stocking up on its supply of secretaries. All that effort training for something and not seeing the changes already coming. In the 1970s they might have got, what, a decade or so's use out of those skills? And now the pace of technological advance is approaching warp speed. As Billinghurst, head of Canterbury's Human Interface Technology lab, asks, who the heck is going to have the job they originally trained for in another 20 years?"

FORDISM AND ITS MULTIPLE SEQUELS

n a new and novel study, scientists are looking to nature - specifically, to ants, bees and viruses - for ways to improve human collaboration during disaster relief efforts. At the center of the scientists' sights are a sub-group of their own species - s

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may b

Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite's environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response

The third of the four principles of multicellular systems is that much of the communication between cooperating entities (cells, social insects or computers) is indirect. The entities deposit long-lived cues in external structures -- connective tissue, te

The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, they examine e

"In the last few months, there has been a great amount of interest into the area of using Bitcoin-like blockchains - the mechanism that allows for the entire world to agree on the state of a public ownership database - for more than just money. Commonly cited applications include using on-blockchain digital assets to represent custom currencies and financial instruments ("colored coins"), "smart property" devices such as cars which track a colored coin on a blockchain to determine their present legitimate owner, as well as more advanced applications such as decentralized exchange, financial derivatives, peer-to-peer gambling and on-blockchain identity and reputation systems. Perhaps the most ambitious of all cited applications is the concept of autonomous agents or decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) - autonomous entities that operate on the blockchain without any central control whatsoever, eschewing all dependence on legal contracts and organizational bylaws in favor of having resources and funds autonomously managed by a self-enforcing smart contract on a cryptographic blockchain."