What the Gems project proposes strikes me as a fascinating vision of how our next industrial revolution can proceed along lines that are at once both more human and more efficient than anything achieved before. Their aim is to massively disrupt the booming Micro Tasks crowdsourcing economy, a poster child of the gig economy. But how they plan to do it opens up many more possibilities.

You say you want a revolution

As the industrial revolution transformed the world during the 18th and 19th century there were many growing pains, to put it mildly. The disappearance of traditional jobs and ways of life had the most acute impact on the working men, women and children swept along by this transformational wave. Our modern city-oriented economies, societies and nation states crystallised during this time. Booming populations, absolute labour flexibility and the corollary of non-existent worker rights led to an incredible mix of economic growth, innovation and unfortunately desperate working conditions. This mix would eventually lead to the formation of political and worker organisations, never before seen, dedicated to rebalancing the power relationship between employer and employee. Many hard-fought, yet eventually win-win, victories were carved out as these campaigns and struggles helped rebalance the complex dynamics in these new modern societies.

Well you know, we all want to change the world

The pace of technological advancement in this 21st century has brought societies and economies within sight of another explosion of growth, innovation and transformation. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service that epitomises many of the convention-breaking and exciting possibilities that this era has begun to open up. Casting traditional employer-employee and even centuries old organisational conventions aside for better-fit, on-demand collaborative relationships. Ones that open up opportunities for combining the amazing power of technology with the incredible capabilities of mass organised human capital and the inimitable human ingenuity that this represents. Hopefully history will show us that the simplistic use-cases of crowd-sourced micro-tasking pioneered by MTurk were merely humanity dipping its toe in the water of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Much like the first industrial scale factories were impressive in their new-ness and wonderous capabilities. Yet the narrowness of their vision, based on output-at-any-cost, would eventually lead to demands for the humanizing of working environments and employer practices.

You tell me that it’s evolution

The Gems Protocol … assesses the validity of work and trust of network participants, generating multiple powerful effects

Leveraging the power of incentivization, the relationship between the employed and the employer, or that between miner and requester to use the Gems parlance, can be finely tuned to achieve degrees of trust that fast-forward these collaborations to a level of efficiency unachievable today by the centralized players in this space. The crowd-sourcing of micro-tasks in the most efficient way possible is the first goal of this ambitious project. Yet even at this early stage the creators already recognise the inherent flexibility in their proposed solution for disrupting the Micro-task space. And that the eventual applications of their high-trust, payment ready, extensible platform are only beginning to be imagined.