🔗 Customer Futures Perspective: It’s not about your identity - it’s about your identifiers

🔗 Identity as a Product … neat idea from @dave

An identity service as a business. Operated by a strong company with longevity and a good track record for treating users and developers fairly.

Hmm - let me think who that might be?

Over on LinkedIN, 🔗 Richard Foster-Fletcher - founder of 🔗 MKAI asks

The full piece is here

I started to reply and of course LinkedIN gave me its usual ‘too long’ message … hence the post. (Those that follow me, might recognize some of the arguments.)

My Response

Yes we do need to rethink work-life balance … and we should start by scrapping the concept entirely. I doubt Ed Sheeran (to pick a random name) worries about his work-life balance? Or anybody who is doing what they love and getting paid to do it for that matter.

The problem is that for most people ‘work’ is not a passion, or love … it is the means to an end of building income that then allows them to follow their passion. Remember ‘hobbies’? Remember ‘holidays’? Remember retirement? … all constructs that allow people to take a break from ‘the machine’ and do what they really want to do.

Work-Life balance is one of those. It is only needed in a world where the work part is not your dream, passion, love …. So bring on the AIs and let them pick up the drudgery of our work lives. Let people move on to thinking and doing things that they consider meaningful and love and have a passion for.

Of course, this Utopia is destined to fail, without significant changes in the social fabric of society.

Take a look at what most musicians, artists, writers (insert the thing you really love and want to do) actually earn and quickly realise that they don’t make a living, much less a good one. Now imagine doubling or trebling the number of people trying to earn a living in that way .. and ask yourself if X million people currently struggle to make a living, how 2X or 3X are going to do that?

Bonus question. When will corporations stop thinking of customers and staff as two distinct ‘audiences’, and realize that they are all connected, starting with the fact that they are all people. As more companies shed people from their books through automation, outsourcing, off shoring and now (apparently) AI, they get to produce more and more things for customers to buy at less and less cost. Thats the ‘maximizing shareholder value’ bit.

Last time I looked, the buying power of the robot market was non existent - primarily because they don’t get paid for the work they do. As ‘the machine’ replaces more and more people by ‘machines’, there will be less and less people earning income to buy the stuff that the corporations are producing, it doesn’t matter how good their product is … nobody can buy it, even if they want to. Then what?

This is why asking what the future of work looks like is asking the wrong question.

BTW - Richard hosts an excellent salon under the umbrella of MKAI, hit me up if you would like to join - and I will connect some dots.

🎛️ The Future Of Income

Over the years I have used different words, different ‘lenses’, different ‘glasses’, ‘filters’ - but it all comes down to this.

And too quickly I am told that ‘UBI’ is not the solution, to which I point out that I never said it was. Delighted to hear David Wood making exactly the same point. He goes on …

what is happening is not business as usual.

I agree.

The Full Podcast:

🎙️ David Wood Talking On David Brown’s Podcast

🎛️ Whats good for the Goose is good for the Gander

13 seconds that neatly encapsulates the People First challenge. Maybe AI will finally push open the flood gates

The Full Podcast:

🎙️ Peter Kafka Talks AI

Whilst you are waiting for Open AI to lose this message …

The server is currently overloaded with other requests. Sorry about that! You can retry your request, or contact us through our help center at help.openai.com if the error persists.

… and get on with generating your latest way cool graphic … know that I am seeing no wait time at Stable Diffusion and MidJourney plus images seem to be getting generated in less than 10 seconds.

Sure - they might not be as ‘hot’ as what you want - but unlike the Open-AI experience - you do at least get one!

Via Doc Searls

🔗 Project Sibol

… aims to make individuals become more aware of the risks and benefits of data trading and sales, and take steps to protect their own data … …. is the first step towards unpacking and untangling the complex world of data exchanges. … we hope to provide guidance on how industry groups and associations can develop better codes of conduct and best practices for data exchanges.

This Is Not The End.

🔗 Nick Cave on Growing Older - older mind you … not ‘old’.

This IS The Beginning.

🔗 Nick Cave on Being Young.

I have been saying that My Speciality is Generality for years.

Turns out there is some science behind it.