Recommendations for an ultra-free society 3: A mosaic-style way to work

■Recommendations for an ultra-free society 3: A mosaic-style way to work        

 

　The ultra-free society will lead to a revolution in the way we work and play.

　If general AI appears on the scene, we will be able to get by with only 10% of the population working. 90% of today’s jobs will be handled by AI or robots. That will actually increase production, and we will be able to distribute the fruits and live on basic income. I can see a future like that.

 

　But it’s difficult to anticipate what it looks like when only 10% of people are working and 90% are playing. Wouldn’t it become a situation instead where most people are working a little bit, little by little? It would be something like a situation where it’s not clear whether people are working or playing, and they’ll be quite busy, wouldn’t it?

　From the Industrial Revolution to modern times and the present day, mechanization and automation have progressed, and things have become convenient and efficient. Movement and communication have both become freer. We have been freed from field labor and from simple manual labor to a considerable extent. That has freed up our time. But we aren’t just sitting around being lazy - on the contrary, we are fussing about all the time. We are busy. Our work, play, and lives have all sped up.

　When AI takes our jobs and we hand our work over to them, that probably doesn’t mean that we’ll be sitting around doing nothing; work for us to do instead will spring up in its place, and things we need to do in the freed-up time - whether entertainment, creating works, or love - will appear in large amounts, and we’ll probably still be busy.

 

　Lecturer Atsushi Hiyama from Tokyo University proposed “mosaic-style work”, where multiple people do a job for one person. He advocates three types of work - time-sharing work where people combine their time, remote work done through remotely operated robots or VR, and virtual talent synthesis, where multiple people’s skills are combined together. I agree.

　Even without waiting for general AI, this is something that needs to be implemented in the context of the sharing economy. The sharing economy is the result of digitization and the transition to smart technology. The global scale of this economy was $15 billion in 2013, and is predicted to grow to $330 billion in 2025.

　We have started from businesses that share large items such as homes (Airbnb) and cars (Uber), and have now become able to share small items such as bicycles and clothing. However, sharing things that everyone has like time or skills has much more unlimited potential, and will grow into a large business in the future.

 

　As a result of the Sharing Economy Conference by the government that I participated in, the Sharing Economy Association created rules on voluntary restraints, and started a system to certify suitable sharing economy services. Most of the services approved in the first round of certification were ones such as childcare or housework that were based on models that shared people’s time and skills. Yes, that is the winner.

　Creating a schedule and skill list of the things you can do and want to do, and providing these as modules. Sharing these as sharing services. Combining these modules in the form of a mosaic and designing a job. That’s it.