The future of work? Hiring yourself out online.
We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future.
jobs and employment may be different than before, but that does not mean labour is no longer valuable. The economy experiences more growth when more people are employed productively and that creates a natural incentive for the market to put as many people to work as possible. There is no reason to believe this time is any different.
The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.
This isn’t just another startup trend though, this could be the beginning of a new way of buying services and selling ourselves – and it may even help save the economy.
Here at The Next Web, we recently highlighted a growing trend amongst startups to offer human beings for hire. It seems that every week new companies emerge that allow people to offer up their skills, or just their personalities, to others who will happily pay for them.
This isn’t just another startup trend though, this could be the beginning of a new way of buying services and selling ourselves – and it may even help save the economy.
Below, we explore why self-service labor markets could be so important in the future. First though, who are these startups and what are they offering?
TaskRabbit – the odd job marketplace
TaskRabbit is a good place to start. A marketplace for people and tasks, it allows individuals to post jobs they need doing and find others who are happy to carry them out.
Many of the tasks listed at present are of the ‘odd job’ variety – putting up shelves, cleaning and such like – but despite the mundanity of the tasks, this is very much a 21st Century labor market, with an online dashboard for users to manage their tasks and ‘Task Rabbits’ (the people who carry out the jobs) to find new ones. The service can also be accessed via an iPhone app and is currently available in the US, in Boston; the San Francisco Bay area; New York City; Los Angeles, and Orange County.
As we recently reported, Task Rabbits are often retired individuals with skills and spare time; stay-at-home parents who want to contribute to the household but maintain flexibility, or part-time (or even full-time) workers looking for extra cash in a poor economic climate. Tasks tend to be posted by busy professionals and small businesses looking for additional casual labor.
MyGuidie – easy access to tour guides
Another section of the ‘humans for hire’ startup movement is tour guides. We recently highlighted MyGuidie, a Polish startup that offers professional city guides and passionate amateurs the chance to show strangers around the city of their choice.
Guides can be given scores by those who have already used them, helping build their online reputation. Customers place a 15% deposit online, and pay the remaining fee in cash on the day of the tour. We recently covered MyGuidie when it raised its first finance via a Polish auction website, selling a 1% stake in the company (and an iPad 2) to an American first-time investor for $6806. An innovative way of funding, indeed.
Skillshare – anyone can be a teacher
Skillshare is a community marketplace for offline classes, letting you learn anything from someone who has the skills to teach you.
Currently available classes include ‘How To Launch your Startup Idea for Less than $5,000′; ‘Take Better Pictures With Any Camera (Even Your Phone)’, and ‘Painting I: Introduction to Traditional Oil Technique’, and classes can cover a wide variety of categories, from Fashion & Style, to Sport & Wellness.
Earlier this week, Skillshare announced that it had raised a $3.1 million Series A funding round, showing that investors believe that this is a business with real potential. As the New York Times reported at the time, the startup has 600 ‘teachers’ signed up just four months after it launched, charging an average of $20 for a place in a class. Even after Skillshare takes its 15% cut, teachers can reportedly make over $1000 from every class they arrange through the site.
Skillshare’s manifesto pitches it as a company that will usher in a ‘learning revolution’, debunking the idea that a college/university degree is the key to success.
Pal Locale – the all-rounder
Pal Locale, as we noted last week, is billed as “a community of pals available for rent by the hour.” Although it hasn’t launched yet, it looks best thought of as an ‘all-rounder’, allowing people to offer themselves out to do just about anything. Want to rent someone for an hour to show you the sights in a city you’re passing through? Or to teach you a new skill? Or just to take you out for the evening? Pal Locale wants to have you covered.
Do these startups have a long-term future?
Startups that offer marketplaces for people and their skills are best thought of as a kind of ‘AirBnB or Couchsurfing for humans rather than property’. Given the traction that the online short-term accommodation rental business has gained in the past year, it’s only natural to see startups riffing on the idea by extending it to people and skills.
In the current economic climate, it makes sense to offer platforms for people to sell themselves. The likes of AirBnB and Couchsurfing, not to mention longer-standing examples like eBay and Craigslist, have shown that the Internet is the best marketplace there is, and there’s clearly money to be made in allowing users to ‘self-serve’ each other with products and services – it may even become a necessity.
Jeff Jarvis recently wrote about ‘The jobless future‘, noting how technological progress was wiping out the need for a wide range of jobs without the prospect of enough new jobs emerging to replace them.
“Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth…
Pick an industry: newspapers, say. Untold thousands of jobs have been destroyed and they will not come back. Yes, new jobs will be created by entrepreneurs — that is precisely why I teach entrepreneurial journalism. But in the net, the news industry — make that the news ecosystem — will employ fewer people in companies. There will still be news but it will be far more efficient, thanks to the internet.
Take retail. Borders. Circuit City. Sharper Image. KB Toys. CompUSA. Dead. Every main street and every mall has empty stores that are not going to be filled. Buying things locally for immediate gratification will be a premium service because it is far more efficient — in terms of inventory cost, real estate, staffing — to consolidate and fulfill merchandise at a distance. Wal-Mart isn’t killing retailing. Amazon is. Transparent pricing online will reduce prices and profitability yet more. Retail will be more efficient.”
We’re rapidly approaching a future where big business simply won’t need anywhere near as many people as it used to. However, if people don’t have jobs, they can’t spend money – and what happens to the economy then? What happens to us?
Self-service labor markets like the websites we’ve detailed here are one way that people can make money directly from each other. While none of the startups we’ve mentioned here pretend that they’re offering participants anything more than the chance of a little extra income (there are no promises of being able to make a full-time living from them), they are clearly well positioned to capitalize on a future where many more of us may need to become self-employed service providers, offering whatever skills we have directly to those who need them.
There’s no telling what the future of the economy holds, but peer-to-peer transactions look set to be a big part of it, simply by necessity. However, while we can expect more startups like the ones above to emerge to tackle the supply side of this equation, the unknown quantity remains demand. Do enough people want to buy services directly from others to make businesses like these viable on a large scale? That’s the gamble that the likes of Skillshare and TaskRabbit are taking.
A true "Skynet Becomes Aware" moment. Watson's children will become Job Terminators for the 21st century.
video by engadget
UPDATE: This is now the topic of my South by Southwest proposal. Please go vote for and comment on it here.
We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future.
Holding out blind hope for the magical appearance of new jobs and the reappearance of growth in the economy is a fool’s faith. Politicians who think that merely chanting the incantation “jobs, jobs, jobs” will bring them and the economy back are fooling us if not themselves. When at least a tenth of Americans are out of work, for Wall Street to get momentarily giddy at the creation of 117k jobs is cognitive dissonance at its best. No one can make jobs out of thin air. Jobs will not come back. A few new jobs reappearing won’t fix anything.
Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth. That is the notion I want to explore now.
Pick an industry: newspapers, say. Untold thousands of jobs have been destroyed and they will not come back. Yes, new jobs will be created by entrepreneurs — that is precisely why I teach entrepreneurial journalism. But in the net, the news industry — make that the news ecosystem — will employ fewer people in companies. There will still be news but it will be far more efficient, thanks to the internet.
Take retail. Borders. Circuit City. Sharper Image. KB Toys. CompUSA. Dead. Every main street and every mall has empty stores that are not going to be filled. Buying things locally for immediate gratification will be a premium service because it is far more efficient — in terms of inventory cost, real estate, staffing — to consolidate and fulfill merchandise at a distance. Wal-Mart isn’t killing retailing. Amazon is. Transparent pricing online will reduce prices and profitability yet more. Retail will be more efficient.
The housing market has imploded and is not likely to reinflate for a long time to come. So the market for new homes will not recover and construction jobs will not come back.
I can and will keep going, but later. Technology and related trends, including globalization, lead to efficiency in companies and sectors. Transparent markets lead to lower prices. Digital abundance leads to both.
All this has profound implications on both business strategy and policy, but we’re not facing these issues as, instead, our leaders keep trying to resuscitate old markets and old ways. Bailing out banks only transferred debt from them to governments (read: citizens), leading to Europe’s mess. Bailing out GM gave life support to an industry that deserves disruption. Fighting over debt in Congress — and reducing the markets’ faith in the markets, leading to this week’s mess — isn’t the issue. The question is, what should government be doing — where it should be investing — to improve our lot in the future as the size of government with the taxes available will inevitably shrink with the economy.
Don’t fill potholes — or rather. don’t think that will fix the economy. Instead, we should be investing in the entrepreneurs who will create jobs — if fewer — and wealth — greater, thanks to platforms and efficiencies. Invest in education of our youth and our unemployed. Invest in efficiency — energy efficiency, for example.
As I say, these are ideas I want to explore now and I hope you’ll help me by sharing yours.
: MORE DISCUSSION: There is an amazing discussion going on not only in the comments here but also at Google+ here.
Paul Graham of Y Combinator led off another amazing debate at HackerNews here.
I crossposted to HuffingtonPost here.
Henry Blodget just crossposted it at Business Insider here.
Thanks to all this amazing discussion, I just substituted my South by Southwest talk from publicness to this topic. Thank you all for the inspiration and for pushing the ideas here.
This is the next topic I want to work on, as I said. So this discussion is invaluable to me as I explore these notions. Again, thank you.
: Here is the text I resubmitted to SXSW under the title, “Honey, we shrunk the economy.”
: See also Rob Paterson’s post on the end of the job and corporation as we knew them. And another thoughtful post from Ben Casnocha.
: Jason Calacanis riffs on the idea of creating a retraining program that would give people the opportunity to move to new jobs.
: Eric Reasons, who really kept me going on this topic when I first raised it on my blog a few years ago, answers the questions in my SXSW talk proposal.
The boom in independent work is changing the way we think about jobs and careers. Does Washington get it?
The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
Sep 15th 2011, 12:37 by A.S. | NEW YORK
DOES America really need more jobs? You’d think the answer would be an unambiguous yes. "Media theorist" Douglas Rushkoff questions whether the economy actually requires more jobs, however. He reckons we’ve reached a point where, because of technology, we simply don’t need as many people to produce the same amount of output.
New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs -- as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
But this argument is wrong. First, even if we had the will and resources to pay generous unemployment benefits indefinitely, there's a large psychic cost to both individuals and society to high levels of long-term unemployment. His argument also fails in economic terms. Throughout the industrial era someone has always claimed that technology makes human workers obsolete. Consistently, though technology initially displaced some workers, it ultimately created safer, better quality jobs and increased wealth and prosperity. Technology eventually makes workers better off by increasing the value of their work. The more people put to productive work, the more economic growth we experience. For technology to increase wages and growth, people must be in productive jobs. If we focus too narrowly on getting people into any job at all we are merely prolonging the pain. A focus on jobs should consider the productivity of new employment.
Mr Rushkoff does touch on an important point. Innovation can initially cause displacement, and America may be experiencing a structural adjustment, where some people do not have skills the market demands. That, however, suggests a structural adjustment of skills is necessary, and not that humans have become obsolete. According to Ned Phelps, structural unemployment may be higher now than it was pre-crisis, at about 7.5%. But the structural rate is a medium-term variable, it is not permanent, though it can be persistent.
Our survey last week discusses the new realities of the modern labour market. It is still uncertain where good jobs will come from that can sustain the middle class. That does not mean that good jobs for the middle class are a relic of the past. A colleague at Free exchange discusses good jobs: what that means and the scope is for policy to foster an enviroment where they will be created. But what we mean by a good job may have changed. We’ve come to define manufacturing jobs as high quality because of the stability, good wages, and tenure-based benefits they provided to many people. But new technology and globalisation have changed the nature of work. Before workers were rewarded by building lots of firm-specific capital, or knowledge about the particular firm they worked for (its politics, what it produced etc.), so many people stayed in the same job for many years.
Now, the world is more competitive and requires more specialised skills. The labour market rewards individual capital, being adaptable, knowing your industry, keeping your skills fresh and having a network of peers. The best way to build this is by changing jobs more frequently; a good job now must enhance your personal skill set which you can take somewhere else. That is why even before the crisis, average tenure was declining and most job churn was voluntary. This is a large shift in our definition of what a good job means. Even Mr Rushkoff admits that continuously redefinition of the nature of work is not new:
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
To a large degree, jobs and employment may be different than before, but that does not mean labour is no longer valuable. The economy experiences more growth when more people are employed productively and that creates a natural incentive for the market to put as many people to work as possible. There is no reason to believe this time is any different.
Using more than a decade of research, a start-up company is taking computer-generated news articles to a more sophisticated level.
There are actually two recessions:
The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.
The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.
Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.
There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...
Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiencies are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?
No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.
It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.
The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.
This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.
I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.
When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.
Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.
Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping... in the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.
The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.
This means we may need to change our expectations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...
Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.
This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.
The system will adjust of course, though I can’t yet say exactly how. Perhaps some new part of the economy will come forward and generate a whole new set of jobs. Perhaps we will have short workweeks and long vacations so there will be more jobs to go around.
May 2012—Mayors of Atlanta and Houston and the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, City of New York discuss how US cities are dealing with increased urbanization, crumbling infrastructure, and crime, how they are positioning themselves to compete globally, and what are the best practices and worst realities of being mayor.more
Automation is edging into some of the last redoubts of human-only work, such as sales.
WASHINGTON—A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Nort...
Getting patients discharged from hospitals is time-consuming, but not if you have a robotic nurse give the patients all the info they need (and banter with them about baseball).
FoxConn's parent, Hon Hai, has announced that it will be constructing a new robotics manufacturing facility in Taiwan.
Codecademy, the startup that makes an interactive and social web application aimed at teaching people how to write computer code, has gone the platform route. On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques.
LinkedIn founder and Greylock Partners VC Reid Hoffman wants to be a business book guru, too.
You are about to become obsolete. You think that you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong.
Don't worry, we won't post anything.
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