“Robots are coming for our jobs” has become a popular refrain, and with good reason: Fortune estimates robots may steal as many as 800 million jobs in the next 13 years.
But it’s not just robots — blockchain may be coming for our jobs, too. If you’re a middle-manager, that is.
Though each organization is different, the role of middle management is generally consistent: they’re the link between senior management and junior levels of the organization. These are often facilitators, or those who ensure organizational strategy is executed on the front-lines.
But here’s the thing: if that work is easily-quantifiable, blockchain smart contracts can easily verify the work getting done and flag when expectations aren’t being met.
As software absorbs these responsibilities, middle management is suddenly far less important.
Who’s Actually Doing This?
Two different companies are deploying protocols to execute various parts of this: Regium and HUMAN Protocol.
Regium is an EOS protocol for managing digital assets. The company recently announced two key features, Continuous Compensation and Recursive Incentive Distribution, which they are making available to data and content ownerships that build on their platform.
This means a content owner who sells their content on a Regium dApp can circumvent centralized distribution platforms (like the Apple App Store) but not worry about having to play the role of middle-manager — the content owner can rest assured that the platform is (provably) executing functions correctly.
HUMAN Protocol focuses on human labor and, at this point, the type of work commonly done by Amazon Mechanical Turk. One such example is their hCaptcha project — hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that compensates web publishers for the data labeling work their end-users are doing (rather than give it to Google for free).
HUMAN relies on smart contracts to verify tasks are being completed (to satisfaction) and automatically deploys compensation.
Between Regium, HUMAN, and future blockchain projects in the same vein, it appears far more than 800 million jobs will be touched by increasingly-intelligent technologies.
And I have a feeling it won’t be long before they start wearing ties, too.
Andrew J. Chapin is the Co-Founder & CEO of Benja, head of the benjaCoin token project, author of Art of the Initial Coin Offering, and a token advisor for several projects.