Power-Curve Society

Bollier, David. "Power-Curve Society." The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2013. 

From the report: "Power-Curve Society, written by David Bollier, examines how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes. It addresses the growing concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy. It also examines cutting-edge innovations in personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment. Power-Curve Society is the Report of the Twenty-First Annual Roundtable on InformationTechnology, a dialogue convened by the Communications and Society Program." Read more

Crowdsourcing Grows Up as Online Workers Unite

Hodson, Hal. "Crowdsourcing Grows Up as Online Workers Unite." New Scientist, February 7, 2013. 

From the article: "Crowdsourcing might be big business now but it has never been fair. The pay is terrible, there is zero regulation and no recourse for workers if things go wrong. But crowdsourcing's Wild West days of exploitation could soon be over. Moves to make employers more accountable and give crowd workers more benefits are helping shift the balance in favour of the employees." Read more

Big Data and Cloud Computing Empower Smart Machines to Do Human Work, Take Human Jobs

"Big Data and Cloud Computing Empower Smart Machines to Do Human Work, Take Human Jobs." The Washington Post, January 24, 2013. 

From the article: "From giant corporations to university libraries to start-up businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition they can’t win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier to use." Read more

Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy

Geron, Tomio. "Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy." Forbes, January 23, 2013. 

From the article: "The “gig economy,” the plethora of microjobs fueled by online marketplaces offering and filling an array of paid errands and office chores, has been well-documented, and sites like TaskRabbit, Execand Amazon’s Mechanical Turk continue to grow apace. What Larson finds himself in, however, is something lesser-noticed and potentially far more disruptive–a share economy , where asset owners use digital clearinghouses to capitalize the unused capacity of things they already have, and consumers rent from their peers rather than rent or buy from a company." Read more

Preparing for the Worst: Author Martin Ford Imagines a Future when Machines Have All the Jobs

"Preparing for the Worst: Author Martin Ford Imagines a Future when Machines Have All the Jobs." The Washington Post, January 24, 2013. 

From the article: "Martin Ford saw it everywhere, even in his own business.

Smarter machines and better software were helping companies do more work with fewer people. His Silicon Valley software firm used to put its programs on disks and ship them to customers. The disks were made, packaged and delivered by human beings. Now Ford’s customers can just download the software to their computers — no disks, no packaging, no delivery workers.

… He suggests imposing massive taxes on companies, which would be paying far less in wages thanks to automation, and distributing the proceeds to those left unemployed by technology. That would give them money to spend to keep the economy spinning.

To prevent the creation of a massive, idle underclass, Ford suggests paying incentives for people to keep going to school and to behave in ways that benefit the environment and society.

He admits his ideas are “fairly radical and political untenable ... But I don’t believe there are any easy conventional solutions.” Read more

The Future of Crowd Work

Kittur, Aniket, Nickerson, Jeffrey V. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. "The Future of Crowd Work." Paper to be presented at the 16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported cooperative Work 2013, Forthcoming.

From the report: "Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation." Read more