Following on from my review of Contract Vault.

Another Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has caught my eye, another one which is aiming to make a big mark on the World.

Open Source University

Open Source University (OSU) is a coin and blockchain which aims to connect Universities Businesses and Individuals in a trustless, secure way, and with low operating costs.

From their whitepaper pg 3: ‘The OS.University decentralized platform bridges the gap between businesses and education through the blockchain (used for validating and verifying learners’ credentials) and smart contracts (managing content purchases, marketplace transactions and hiring processes).’

OSU is proposing two main functions:

The first is a global decentralized marketplace which connects all online courses and makes them payable in the EDU token. OSU will aggregate online courses from Universities and various MOOCs.

The second main function is a distributed credentials database, which will allow traceable qualifications. OSU will allow learners to build profiles of all their learning qualifications in a trusted and verifiable manner. This will tackle the problem with fake qualifications which makes it difficult for companies to validate credentials and costs them a lot of money.

But also, one of the most exciting elements, a sophisticated matching algorithm to match learners with job opportunities. Whilst also providing smart contract for hiring processes. It will play the role of recruiter and HR specialist in one.

This proposition could be massive and circumvent much trauma from the incoming robots. The what?

Save us from the Machines!

Fortuntately not from incoming killer robots, but we are approaching a time where much of the work we do as a global community is increasingly being automated through the accelerating growth of artificial Intelligence, computing power, smart software, and robotics.

A landmark paper by Oxford University predicted 37% of current work in the U.S could be automated by the mid 2030s, and for poorer countries, up to 65% of jobs could be automated

However, even over the next 5–10 years there will be massive displacement with new robots, self driving cars, and fully automated shops like Amazon Go.

If you watched the video from Google showing their Google Duplex tech where an AI assistant made a hairdressing appointment and another enquired about a restaurant booking. It’s not too far a leap to see how certain types of calls in call centres will be automated with this type of technology.

The headline of all of this is there will be a huge amount of people laid off who will need reskilling and matched up to new jobs.

The World will need profound social innovation to tackle what will be one of the great challenges of our age. This is why OSU is such an important and exciting project. The abilitity to cost effectively match displaced people with courses and employment, in a smart, trusted and decentralised way.

How soon can they save us?

OSU have been working on their platform since 2015 but as I said at the beginning, the project is going through it’s ICO at the moment so if you see the potential in this project, you can back it here.

For this year, they will start with pilot implementations and then move on to a revenue-generating beta phase in 2019.

This is an ambitious project and will take some time for everything to fall in place for a full product release, but if there is something which is worth the wait, it’s this OSU project.