Just returning from HICSS conference, where one of the keynotes was on augmented intelligence…. got me thinking about augmented intelligence for individuals, businesses, and families – three important types of service system entities.
To see where I am coming from, this Politico article is a worthwhile careful read:
The Real Future of Work
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/04/future-work-independent-contractors-alternative-work-arrangements-216212
…these perspectives surprised me:
“It was also clear from the Katz-Krueger data that the shift to contingent work wasn’t driven by the rise of the sharing economy. Just 0.5 percent of workers are in the sharing economy, accounting for at most 10 percent of the labor market shift over the past 10 years. In other words, for all the concerns about Uber and other sharing economy companies using independent contractors to skirt state and federal labor laws, the shift toward these workplace arrangements predates those companies. They’re followers, not leaders.“
“Congress didn’t create similar workplace protections for independent contractors because they were considered to effectively be their own small business, setting their own hours and responsibilities, providing their own benefits and determining their own economic outcomes. More independence came with fewer social protections, a trade-off that many Americans support. According to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report, independent contractors are slightly more likely to be satisfied with their jobs than full-time employees, and fewer than 10 percent said they would prefer a different type of employment.”
“If the workplace is changing so much, would it be possible to invent a new kind of worker? One solution that has begun to arise among labor experts is to create a third, hybrid worker classification—something between an employee and a contractor, offering protections to people, like Uber drivers, who might not be “employees” but work chiefly for one company. But this argument has already started to break down along partisan lines. Republicans tend to support it as overdue acknowledgment that many workers in the modern workplace don’t fit neatly into the employee or contractor box. Democrats are wary of creating a category that might let employers shift even more employees into less-stable work arrangements.”
Like the above read, which shows which category of workers is growing fastest – I still think “why” is not clearly understood, my hunch is there is a wealth effect happening at the extended family-level due to costs dropping from technology deflation, but I could be wrong. I think the most vulnerable in society could be those without large “extended families” living near to them. Not sure what data would show this, since “extended family” does not have to be blood relatives – it is “a network of people who care about and support each other as they make smart/wise service exchanges,” but that is my hunch just looking around and thinking about the situation the most people in the world are in… The individual is probably not the right unit of analysis for worker policy anymore, maybe it never has been. Augmented intelligence for extended families is a good area for study I think.
Thanks to Bill Daul for sending the pointer to the Politico article.
At HICSS conference one of my favorite presentations was about simulating service systems entities following Service-Dominant logic principles. Abstractly one can think about the actors as individuals, businesses, or families learning one of three skills for surviving (operant resources) – two skills involve gathering resources from nature (the environment) and one of the skills involves gathering resources through trade/exchange (the social network). See paper by Fujita, Vaughan, and Vargo:
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/50087/1/paper0200.pdf
Augmented intelligence may work best for entities that use a service-dominant architect.
Thinking about a service-dominant architecture for businesses was another interesting HICSS paper: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/50091/1/paper0204.pdf
We also need service-dominant architecture for individuals and families.
Service-dominant architecture for individuals and families will depend on cognitive assistants, evolving on our smartphones and home devices, which brings us to this HICSS paper: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/50092/1/paper0205.pdf
We need better data collection and simulation tools to inform policy development. The early stage simulation above is a good step towards tools that can help understand the evolving ecology of service system entities, with their capabilities and constraints, rights and responsibilities. The three skills (operant resources) that it begins to model are all exploitation-oriented from the perspective of March’s exploitation-exploration capabilities of learning systems (all organizations are learning systems). So to add a fourth skill (operant resoure) to the SD logic simulator, it would be interesting to think about a skill associated with exploration that can create new types of resources, either finding them in nature or finding them in social networks. See this article to understand exploitation-exploration in organizational learning: http://www.analytictech.com/mb874/papers/march.pdf