Introducing Peerism: the Skill Token Economy for Post-Capitalism
The solution to job automation and wealth inequality
In recent decades it’s become increasingly clear that our global economic system simply does not work for everyone. Wealth inequality is the highest it has ever been in human history, with eight men now controlling more wealth than 3.6 billion people.
Meanwhile we’re seeing the decline of full-time employment and the rise of low-paid, precarious work in the gig or “sharing” economy. Globally we have 200 million unemployed, 600 million 15–24 year-olds not in education, employment, or training (NEETs) and 1.4 billion people in vulnerable employment.
While the situation is bad today, it’s going to get much worse with at least 47% of all jobs on Earth expected to be automated within the next decade.
The effects of automation are already being felt in many communities. Particular groups in the US have seen a reversal in their life expectancy as a result of automation shrinking demand for labor. And as with climate change, those in the “developing” world will be hit hardest. India alone is expected to have a gap of 50 million jobs by 2025.
So how do we solve this?
The simple solution would be for all employers and corporations to share the wealth generated from automation with their workers, and to pay for their re-training and up-skilling. However this would increase costs, reduce profits to shareholders and allow competitors to overtake.
It’s precisely this economic reality that causes automation to be a global concern for humanity, rather than a savior.
Slightly more practical solutions commonly suggested include:
- Universal Basic Income (UBI)
- Job Guarantee (JG)
- Robot Tax
While basic income would provide a revolutionary social protection floor; if issued by governments it could become a dangerous political weapon enabling politicians to raise or lower UBI to control the masses. A robot tax is logistically impossible to implement, and all countries would need to adopt it simultaneously to prevent offshoring. A job guarantee would be a great short-term solution, but will very likely result in committee-created “bullshit jobs”.
Peerism is the solution.
Peerism solves job automation and wealth inequality via a blockchain-based economic protocol which matches paid work to tokenized individual skill levels, and shares the wealth from commons-owned AI.
Not just another band-aid solution or political party; peerism is an opensource decentralized project with a clear strategy to safely transition humanity to a post-capitalist economy that is better for everyone.
The Ethereum-powered protocol autonomously routes tasks directly to the person or commons-owned bot with the required skills. This ensures a workforce resilient to automation by giving workers the choice of ondemand paid tasks matched to their interests, while simultaneously up-skilling.
The key to achieving this is for individuals to work for skill-based cryptocurrency tokens, enabling the economy to be self-aware of their diverse skillsets and to accurately quantify and rank those skills across a distributed global network — this is the goal of Peerism.
Why skill tokens?
Your university or college degree, CV and LinkedIn profile says very little, if anything, about your actual proficiency and diversity of skills or interests. If you have a degree in economics and three years working at Acme Corp, that says nothing of your other talents in #AstroPhotography and #3Dprinting.
Due to the fact that your education and work qualifications are qualified (not quantified), they aren’t universally recognized or transferable across country borders or different online learning and freelance platforms.
By earning skill tokens for each piece of work performed and engaging in those interest communities, you’re able to level-up a unique and diverse set of skills. Via peer-to-peer learning, peerism tightly couples education and work. Individuals pursue their passions while receiving paid work matched to their ever-increasing skill levels.
Your skills become quantified, ranked and transferable anywhere across the decentralized peerism economy.
No more degrees, instead you learn rapidly from others. No more 9-to-5 jobs or competing for low-paid gigs, instead high-paying tasks matched to your skills simply land in your feed ready to one-click claim or pass. No more resumes or CVs with references, instead the economy knows your skills:
- 12,234 $Economics tokens
- 9,123 $AstroPhotography tokens
- 2,345 $3Dprinting tokens
- 270 $FidgetSpinner tokens
In the event one of your skillsets is automated, then you can instantly fallback to any of your other skills, join new skill communities and continue to receive paid work matched to your personal interests.
How can you help?
We need feedback and community for the peerism concept, including developers to build the opensource protocol along with a proof-of-concept app called peer.ai. In early 2018 we’ll have a crowdsale for PEER and #peerAI tokens to raise funds to continue development of both non-profit projects.
This is a collective project that will require input from everyone in our global society with various views, backgrounds and skillsets. Read the FAQ, join the Discord, Telegram, subreddit or Facebook Group to help shape peerism and solve one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
