How Jobs Of The Future Will Change For The Better
This question originally appeared on Quora. Answer by Sondre Rasch.
The job is obsolete. I believe the future of work is very different from what we see today, and I quit my job as policy advisor in for the Norwegian parliament to help make sure it happens.
In the future every person in world will be able to choose to work on what she does best, whenever she chooses, from wherever she wants and be paid the world's value of her produce instantly, with security. While she can collaborate with other's to solve complex tasks, she can choose live and work with her friends and family if she pleases. There will be no mandatory office hours, no commute and far fewer middle managers, thankfully.
The odd bundle of the job is no longer needed, because new technological tools are better at solving the problems of coordination and matching that we previously needed the company to do.
1. The internet is removing the role of the physical border
Today too many people are restricted access to migration and free movement, reducing the dissemination of knowledge and productivity of billions of talented people.
In the future we will have a new global lens through which we view the world, where all the peoples of the world meet online to exchange ideas and services. In in doing, so they transcend boundaries and join the global citizenry in the global communities already seen today on websites like Reddit, GitHub and many others. In the virtual reality of the internet there are no boundaries.
2. Emerging allocation technologies and machine tools will improve our productivity
There is an underlying mega-trend to many of the phenomena we are observing today: the sharing economy, the freelancer economy and crowdsourcing. We are building nodes in what could be described as hive-mind humanity.
The first phase of the internet was a nervous system, where we could sense what was going on in other nodes - the people connected. In the second phase we are discovering that we can perform functions in the real world by cooperating, like biological multicellular organisms once discovered. The difference between a superorganism and a real organism is that we retain our individuality; there is no central unit taking decisions on behalf of all of us, we are all free.
My hope is that such many such functions to hive-mind humanity will be created, thereby making work a more enjoyable experience for both those who work and those who need things done.
Today companies email us office tasks and we instantly assign them to pre-vetted freelancers based on skill and availability. We give them access to tools others have made, to increase their productivity, and give them easy ways to cooperate with eachother online. Gradually these tools will move towards true AI, but from our vantage point they look to always be human-enhancing, only rarely human-replacing.
There's still a long way to go. But already today we see coworking spaces blossoming, the freelancer economy booming and the most dedicated explorers quitting their jobs to become digital nomads. In 10 years work and jobs will looks quite different from today, in a very good way; a more equitable, free and efficient way.
Q&A site Quora. Photo: Quora
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