7: Conclusion, Recommendations and Survival Guide

Throughout this book we have argued that the combination of algorithms, blockchain and cryptocurrency (ABC) has the potential to fundamentally and wholly change the world of work. Indeed, we argue that our very understanding of the terms work and workplace will be structurally altered by the combinational impact of these technologies and that drawing parallels with the economic, social and political shifts of the Industrial Revolution is both appropriate and necessary for our understanding of the effect of these new technologies. We see a future where work is increasingly specialised into its fundamental components or microtasks, where online working, smart contracts and automation (and further mechanisation) have all but eliminated geographic constraints on work, and corporate cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies facilitate a secure but pseudo self-employed global workforce or indeed a global workbank. However, as Frey (2019) convincingly argues, one does not question subsequent generations benefit from the Industrial Revolution albeit in terms of economic growth and living standards, the environmental damage of the subsequent generations living standards, may well prove catastrophic for the next. Yet, Frey notes that the workers transitioning into the Industrial Revolution mode of work and workers within the first stages of the Industrial Revolution were significantly worse off than their predecessors, in terms of overall income, conditions and general living. These workers, in effect, were sacrificed on the alter of progress, and part of this book must look at and recommend a course to attempt to prevent the worker of today (and tomorrow) suffering a similar fate for longer term economic progress. It must have been a benevolent weaver indeed who opted for a 75% reduction in income, a working pattern which all but eliminated their leisure and the accompanying lower life expectancy, greater prevalence of disease and all other aspects of Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills, as a necessary cost for their unknown future generations’ prosperity. We must not ask today’s workers to make the same sacrifice.