GitHub for X

In short, the "Github" model will do to knowledge work what "Uber" did to unskilled labor. It will make work more flexible, compensation more fluid, and the overall environment more dynamic and volatile. This dynamic is consistent with the overarching law of the internet: It gives more people an opportunity to win. But it forces everyone to play th... See more

As a result, more and more knowledge work will become as modular as physical work. Programmers will enjoy the freedom to step in and out of projects as they wish. But their work will also be coordinated, evaluated, and compensated by algorithms and protocols.

For example, every time a user pays for a piece of software, it is now possible to pro-rate the proceeds to anyone who contributes to the software's development. This is similar to how royalties work for music, but now it can be done cheaply and automatically.

On the other hand, blockchains make it easy to assign property rights at a granular level (ownership of single lines of code) and automatically compensate the owners of said rights whenever their "assets" are being used.

On one end, machine learning can track the actual value of a person's contribution to the code base — its quality, its adoption by other colleagues, and how critical it is to the functioning of the overall project.

Despite all this, most programmers still work for a fixed salary. It's too complicated to monitor everyone's precise contribution and to pay them each time they do something. But two important technologies are about to make it much easier.