A Higher Quality of Life in a Transformed Society
“From enabling us to move online to now enabling us to find purpose online . . . technology could be leveraged for self-expression, community building, and service.” 1
—Aaron Hurst
We have focused on the workplace for the individual navigating his or her career and the entrepreneur building his or her business. Forecasting the future is impossible. However, from what we have learned and listened to, we see certain trends and possibilities that may become societal directions to create a more fertile ground for individual initiative, interpersonal collaboration, and a better quality of life for the many everywhere.
The present era of AI, platforms, apps, and global exchanges is undoubtedly transformative, enabling people to innovate, connect, and unleash their creativity and empowerment for productive endeavors. When, at some point in the future, we all look back at the dawn of the age of AI, globally interconnected platforms, and cognitive computing, how will we judge that it changed societal and individual quality of life?
AI Is Open to All And Augments Services to Benefit Others
We already live in a service economy. Service is the application of knowledge for the benefit of others. The empathic entrepreneur is constantly searching for ways to better help consumers and customers. As a result of their efforts, improvements in the quality of life are faster, broader, and deeper. A conscientious individual will seek to align his or her values with their work—not just for self-fulfillment, but also to benefit others.
AI is enabling software that applies knowledge to perform a task as well or better than a person. Most tasks in a modern economy that are based on human knowledge and technical expertise will, over time, be performed better with AI. That means that service, the science of helping people, will be elevated to new levels of availability, reliability, and efficacy. Everyone will get more and better help.
A lot of AI problem solving is on full view and widely available in open source code projects. Challenge websites like Kaggle promote continuous improvements through competition. Apps on smartphones will gain AI-powered capabilities such as conversational interfaces and personalized intelligent search and knowledge curation. Apps will become low-cost digital knowledge workers and helpers, increasingly available and affordable for all. In general, the expertise economy will become opened and expert knowledge and expert techniques will tend toward universal availability. Everyone should benefit from this accessible knowledge.
For example, technical expertise can be captured as knowledge for a health app on a smartphone to access; the app can also record a consumer’s health records and data, from symptoms to DNA; AI-assisted processing can match the technical knowledge to the individual health records to generate a diagnosis and a suggested treatment. Healthcare improves.
Empathy and Human-Centered Design Will Change How Technology Is Applied
Technology development will incorporate knowledge of the arts, humanities, and social science into the design and implementation of AI through platforms, apps, and global exchanges. Rewards will be built into apps to increase engagement. Perhaps increasing human relations skills and intuitive emotional intelligence will also become a more important part of design.
Disintermediation
AI will increasingly empower and enable peer-to-peer contracts, financial exchanges, and dispute resolution, reducing the number of occasions when intermediaries are required. Intermediaries are a form of expertise that can be technically replaced by software for the overall benefit of individuals (via more efficiency, lower cost, and greater security) and of society as a whole.
Among the largest and most influential sets of intermediaries are the institutions of representative democracy. We delegate technically difficult economic and social choices to representatives whom we select to do the job of deciding for us. When a population can be interconnected via smartphones with intelligent apps for processing millions of individual preferences on the issues of the day (or hour or minute), we might redesign our democratic institutions to replace representation with direct access for all.
The End of Bureaucracy
If intelligent apps on interconnected smartphone networks can transform democracy, they can equally transform bureaucracy, not just of the political kind, but in any administrative system. A bureaucracy is a system of administration conducted by trained professionals implementing fixed rules. But, if intelligent software can implement the fixed rules, we may not need to waste humans’ time in this task, and we can release them for higher-order activities. Intelligent software like TurboTax can file an individual’s tax return by combining the individual’s data with the fixed tax law rules on its servers in the Cloud, and deliver a finite result (which is not always the case with the trained professional expert bureaucrats).
Miniaturization
From large corporations, factories, mass-produced branded products and services, we are now headed toward a miniaturized, customized, co-developed future. Factories, farms, and energy flows are miniaturizing. 3D printing (intelligently utilizing recipes and designs in the Cloud available to interconnected individuals with miniaturized hardware) brings manufacturing to the home. Installations like Farmshelf 2 intelligently automate hydroponic growing systems to bring farming to the kitchen or restaurant, with fresh vegetables growing right there next to the stovetop. Solar panel installations and storage batteries turn houses into energy generation plants.
Individuals empowered by eventually hundreds of low-cost intelligent digital knowledge processors and workers, and supported by miniature factories and farms and energy flows, will utilize these “better building blocks” to generate their individualized economic, social, and recreational futures.
New Opportunities for Social Impact
When entrepreneurial individuals are at the center of economic activity in the individual economy, they will create progress not only via their knowledge, skills, empathy, and creativity, but also with their values. They no longer need to suppress their value preferences as they do when working for a company with whose corporate social responsibility efforts they do not feel aligned. Collaborative individuals on business and social teams can exert their preferences in the direction of community impact, social projects, and other forms of shared and psychic rewards that are not necessarily all about monetary profit.
New business metrics can be adopted to include social impact, including acknowledgment and rewards to businesses for job creation and community-support measurements, rather than just quarterly profit. Social media efforts by concerned stakeholders could tip the scales regarding the attributes of business performance that institutional and individual investors can take into consideration.
An Up-Skilling and Training Community
Individuals will not be alone. Not only will we be highly interconnected, we can be supported by a community dedicated to helping us to learn and do our work better. Lifelong learning will be self-directed, but it will also be platform-supported, multi-sourced, accessible, user-friendly, and affordable. Analytics will enable us to rate and rank all the available learning sources and tools, and objectively assess their impact on career success.
Up-skilling and training the workforce can be a multi-sector effort tied to wage and benefit metrics. Open standards for marketable skills that could be certified and badged—combined with platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, providing universal access to and ratings of training programs—could enable effective lifelong learning to be intelligently self-directed. Individuals must commit to learning. But, increasingly affordable access, user-friendly tools, and crowdsourced evaluative measures, combined with transparent analytics of graduate success, could accelerate the matching of workers to the new market reality.
Individual-Centric Data Systems
Data collection and utilization should be transparent and directed at user ownership, and not just serve the commercial aggregator. Analytics create value from data about individual behavior. But, today, the design collection and use of that data are hidden with no transparency or revenue sharing with the user. If wealth is created from behavioral data, it should be shared with users so that greater benefits can accrue to the many.
New Governance Systems
Estonia is an example of a country that has transformed its social systems to create an online economy and online governance for citizens. Now, Estonia is inviting like-minded individuals from anywhere in the world to become e-citizens. The potential exists for new forms of community and governance and administration, which transcend and replace the old physical boundaries of the geographic nation state and change our thinking about our “country,” “flag,” and “government”.
New Commercial Organizations
Similarly, existing organizational and corporate structures are changing and will change further. Entrepreneurs and small groups will have equal—and perhaps even superior—access to capital, resources, infrastructure, talent, knowledge, analytics, partners, co-creators, and customers. They will be more flexible, speedy, agile, and alert than traditional corporate structures. Finances and human resources will no longer be defined by geography, business size, or the malevolent influences of corrupt governments and strangling bureaucracy, or simply poor local conditions. Investors and entrepreneurs can operate on global platforms such as OurCrowd and Alibaba with increasing independence from structural scale.
Social Media Could Empower the Contingency Workforce
We recently observed the “MeToo” social media effort by women to “out” workplace male bullying and abuse, demonstrating the power of technology-driven spontaneous order by groups of shared interest, hitherto unserved by conventional institutions. A February 2018 school shooting resulted in the launch of a #NeverAgain social media campaign that might change obstinate political minds where traditional democracy has failed. University lecturers, fast food and retail workers, commercial drivers, and many other groups could create similar campaigns to raise awareness with consequences for exploitation.
The Individual Bears Unique Responsibility in the Individual Economy
We must be careful not to be utopian. The benefits we describe for the individual economy enabled by the advances of AI, interconnectivity, and miniaturization will undoubtedly come with risks and challenges.
Our perspective in this book has been that of the individual. We believe the individual has access to great empowerment and self-efficacy in the new era, but those opportunities come with responsibilities. The ultimate responsibility is to pursue knowledge and uniqueness.
Have you done enough aggregate Internet searching and forum commenting to capture all the low-hanging fruits available to you for your personal advancement and risk management? If you answer that question in the affirmative, I am here to tell you that you have not come even close to realizing what is possible. Even heavily committed people barely access 10% of the information that could greatly improve their careers, finances, health, and relationships, and I don’t think there is anyone in the world, no matter how successful, who has implemented more than 50% of what is available to them.3
Economic specialization has been with us since the days of Adam Smith’s pin factory. Today, it is more finely articulated than ever before. In the service economy, our individual task is to serve others by applying knowledge. When an intelligent knowledge-connected app can do that today, the human must stay one step ahead in the only way that humans can: individual uniqueness. We must become acutely conscious of our capabilities, our values, and our desires. To do what we love, what we know, and what we are good at doing require very sophisticated self-examination. Then, we must integrate ourselves with the global interconnected world, working with other like-minded people and machines and teams and organizations to realize our maximum individual potential. We must utilize the potential of accessible knowledge, intelligent digital assistants, and miniaturization to augment ourselves and be as smart as interconnectivity enables us to be. We must be super-efficient, not wasting an iota of energy on anything that detracts from our personal mission of self-realization.
If we accept this responsibility and act upon it, the future is bright for the interconnected individual.
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1A. Hurst. 2014. The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire of Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World (Boise, ID: Elevate), pp. 45, 47.
2Farmshelf. http://www.farmshelf.com
3K. Gada. 2017. The Accelerating TechnOmic Medium (“ATOM”): It’s Time to Upgrade the Economy (New York, NY: Business Expert Press).