Taken by me on a trip to iceland

So, future of work(from now on FOW), everyone discussing FOW is focusing mostly on the machine, AI, and ML aspects of it, but it leaves us a problem, what the fuck do we do with all the people on this planet? And UBI comes in, I believe UBI on paper is a good idea, but I believe it will fail, a few problems I see immediately:

It might backfire. If you give people 1000€ for doing nothing, they will see it as free money and spend it unwisely. Landlords see that everyone gets free money and raise their rents accordingly overnight People might feel “stupid” for needing to receive UBI and feel useless People that think they’re useless get depressed, so we’re back where we started, except instead of unemployed/below the poverty line, they now have money to live, but they’re depressed.

What’s the solution?

Universal basic employment (UBE)

I searched for this term, and although google’s search autocompleted it, I found mostly articles related to UBI, and a few about guaranteed federal employment, something that was tried during the great depression, with mixed results: http://www.geo.coop/blog/basic-income-vs-job-guarantee

Benefits of UBE:

People still have a purpose and this reflects in their quality of life Purpose generally comes with increased happiness People that feel valued perform better Better performance means they are more valuable for employers and the employers don’t feel that “they’re stuck with this UBI loser”.

Here’s the catch

For UBE to work we need to change how work works, and this is what I’m focusing all my energy on.

Patreon created “A culture of learning”, which made the company rise up to a $450mm valuation, to put it very simply, treat people like people, and guess what? They will be happier and perform better, who knew?

My proposal is to scale Patreon’s culture to more companies, universities, and even governments(hey Tyler, if you’re reading, I wanna talk to you).

What changes does work need?

Most importanly:

People are not easily separated into jobs, ask anyone what they want to do with their lives and they’ll feel pretty fucking stuck trying to answer People are not static, work cannot be static, I might be super excited about your “Uber but for chickens”, or “AirBNB but for fish” startup in the first 6 months, but after a while I get pretty damn bored. And that’s fine, someone else might be way more excited. We have to stop pretending people stay at jobs forever, by doing this we allow people to move around and make documentation, a friend(Manish Lamichhane) just brought to my attention “Knowledge Management” (from now on KM) If we have a solid KM strategy, all employees become replaceable by default(I don’t agree with this, but from a business man perspective, this is what I can sell to directors), but instead of favoring the employer, we do it for the employee to have the freedom to hop between projects that motivate him, and leave a company without feeling like he just broke up with a girlfriend, this can have a ridiculous impact on people’s lives. People need to given the choice of how and where they work No more offices if they choose not to have one(within reason, a cleaner will always have to clean at the office, for example, but you can literally ask them if they would prefer to make their own times between X-Y, instead of forcing X) Let people work at whatever time they wish, make asynchronous communication possible with a multitude of different tools

Agile is a framework made to help software projects get done better and faster, but everyone uses it wrong, I want to fix it, and apply it to all problems in the world.

Let people self organize, they will figure it out, this is the Agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Let me repeat the first one: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

One more time: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Now bigger: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Now in all caps: INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS OVER PROCESSES AND TOOLS

Got it? Then WHY are mostly all companies using agile do something like this:

Hey guys we do agile, here’s the manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools[…] Now, here are our 1456 processes and tools that you need to follow that will completely take away your ability to self organize: […] Take Agile to an extreme and apply it to everything, if the team decides to work from a strip club during a live show, but they produce good work, let them do it. If they decide to all work naked at the beach, let them do it, if they decide they like the good ‘ol office, let them, if they decide they can only work on weekends after riding a unicycle for 90 minutes and counting all the kitchen tiles, let them do it. People are no longer “Developers”, “Designers”, “Managers”, “Cleaners”, or “Biologists”, what do all these professions have in common? In fact, what does EVERY SINGLE PROFESSION IN THE WORLD have in common? I will give you some time to think

EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS A PROBLEM SOLVER

Problems motivate people, and when you don’t label people to specific problems interesting things happen, people start to use their experience in one field to solve problems of another, let’s say a “Natural born engineer” is tasked with cleaning a warehouse… He’s probably gonna imagine something like this:

If you motivate him and harness that motivation, he might just make it a reality. If instead you remind him that “He’s just a cleaner”, he will believe it forever.

This gets even more interesting when we get into politics and science, the cure for cancer or the next breakthrough in farming that is needed to scale the population could be in the mind of a street sweeper, but it could also be in the mind of an executive that is pretty fucking tired of his commute and shit boss but the salary is too comfortable to let go.

(Labeling people to specific problems isn’t bad at all, an expert will be VERY good at very few things and will beat a “jack of all trades”, but only sometimes.) But here’s food for thought: an expert in one field can more likely become an expert in another field, such as this guy: Joshua Waitzkin

Anyway, I wrote what I wanted to for now, I hope to get good feedback and I desperately need people to work on this with me, I created a slack channel where we can discuss this(currently I’m the only one in there), please join! We can literally change the world, but I need you.

If you made it this far, PLEASE SHARE WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND!

One more step for UBE to work:

I need your help to get this to the eyes of people such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, please share/tweet/retweet, thank you!

https://join.slack.com/t/remotivateme/shared_invite/enQtMzA3MDE3OTYzNzkzLTYwZDMzODBlOGFmN2U3MTBlYTA2MGNhYWZiMTU0NmRlNDdlYzNjMDllMjI2YjJhYmMyZTY3MDZiYmFkNmJjZDQ

Also, reddit discussion if you’re so inclined: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/7uev7z/ocubiuniversal_basic_income_will_fail_heres_the/