The Future of Work Is Not Corporate — It's DAOs and Crypto Networks | Future

DAOs will eventually replace the traditional model. A DAO is an internet-native organization with core functions that are automated by smart contracts, and with people who do the things that automation cannot (e.g., marketing, software development). In practice, not all DAOs are decentralized or autonomous, so it is best to think of DAOs as interne... See more

In this new future of work, jobs will be more transient and dynamic — switching costs between jobs will be lower, opportunities will be more visible, work will be reduced down into more atomic units, and the entire world will be unified under a single workforce with access to all opportunities. We will discover new opportunities based on our on-cha... See more

There are limits to how much the human brain can process. Dunbar’s number is the notorious limit for how many social relationships the human brain can manage, but “DAObar’s number” is the DAO version of that: how many DAOs can a person be meaningfully involved in? Each subsequent DAO involvement is an increase in the processing power needed to main... See more

DAOs are open and permissionless, but still need new ways of determining who to trust, collaborate with, and reward.

The model of a company having strict boundaries between internal and external may have made sense in the Industrial Age, but in the Information Age, this model leads to misaligned incentives and unsustainable extraction.

“Bounty Hunters” complete clearly defined work for an agreed upon price and / or duration of time. These people are often functional experts in areas such as finance, development, and design, who provide services to many DAOs at one time and fulfill specific tasks with clear boundaries.

On one hand, DAOs allow people to choose how they work and associate with communities where they are value-aligned. On the other hand, by reducing much of work into atomic units and purely financial incentives for actions, we risk reducing people’s meaning to purely financial rewards. We risk turning work into discrete, meaningless tasks, where lab... See more

People’s income will be a mix of things we already currently do in our lives (e.g., play games), things we think of as traditional work (e.g., bounties / contracts), and things that are currently accessible to only a small percentage of the population (e.g., investing, passive income). To think of it another way, DAOs will expand the type and quant... See more

In the future, it’s likely that the average person will not work for a company. Instead, people will earn income in non-traditional ways by taking actions such as playing games, learning new skills, creating art, or curating content. This kind of shift in how we work is not unusual or unexpected — the idea that most people would be employed by larg... See more

"First, we need to explain the shortcomings of existing earning models. Traditional corporate employment is rapidly becoming outdated as a means for coordinating activity in the Information Age — we already see this in the emergence of alternative forms of earning such as influencers, contractors, creators, gig economy participants, and more. These... See more