Without doubt, technological advances are constantly developing towards a future where the necessity for human action in the majority of jobs is eliminated.
This means, that many jobs will simply disappear, widening the gap further between rich and poor. The simpler a job is, the faster it will be automated. Examples range from McDonald's customer service being replaced by self-service kiosks over self-check-ins at Airports to self-driving truck fleets from Daimler (coming soon-ish).
In this post, CCIC evaluates three ways to earn money in an automated world:
Basic Income - every citizen receives an income from the government which is enough for all basic needs
Steemit - renumerated content creation correlating to quality
eciotify - selling and buying the data produced by IoT devices that one owns (democratising data)
1. Starting with Basic Income, a recent steemit post by Scott Santens, the world's first person living on crowdfunded basic income, nicely explains why Basic Income is needed in the future and how it affects the way people strive for self-development. Even though it might appear that laziness is humanity's superior characteristic, it really isn't. Experiments have shown that a basic income allows one to pursue their true interests. For example, a person can pursue Creative Arts, which currently lacks in provided financial stability. One could even go as far as arguing that the root of many criminal activities such as robbery or drug abuse is relative to the lack of a basic income, which would cover basic living needs acceptable to the society in question. (Note: many criminals are justifying their actions with the feeling of not being accepted by society due to not being able to keep up with the expected standard leading to a vicious cycle).
Countries such as Finland, Netherland or Canada are piloting Basic Income experiments to test the effects on motivation, criminality, efficiency as a welfare program and more, all with a rather positive progress.
2. Steemit is, as you might have realised, a pretty cool platform for creating and sharing content while being able to upvote the content that is perceived as being worth spending time on and consuming. Now, there are some major benefits of Steemit compared to regular blog platforms such as Medium or WordPress. Firstly, good content gets paid straight away. Due to this, people get motived to contribute valuable quality content which should improve the overall quality. Arguably, nobody wants to skim through 500 (rather unnecessary) prank clips or Make-Up tutorials on Youtube, before finding actual "quality content". Steemit has the potential to establish itself as the global platform for blogposts, creative content or even scientific publications and let journalists, for example, work on a freelancer-like basis with direct payment.
3. eciotify aims to allow everyone to monetise data that owned IoT devices generate. While today, Google's or Facebook's major revenue streams are from data that is being transformed into valuable ads or alike, the question appears if not the actual users and data creators should benefit from this value generation instead of platform providers or manufacturers. eciotify strives to democratise data, meaning that the actual owner of an IoT device which creates a particular kind of data (e.g. Smart Fridge measures when it uses the most energy & transforms this data into a tradable digital asset), can trade this asset for cryptocurrency on eciotify's IoT infrastructure or how they call it, the "Economy of Things".
This Robin Hood like approach to give back the control and monetisation of data to the actual data producers is a great example for a future where people's biggest job competitors are robots and automation. By owning some of those automation processes, people could let IoT devices work for them and hence manage a whole "company" of own "IoT devices", generating value (revenue).
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