The Future of [Wokr] is DAO!
In the last blog, we explored “What is a DAO?” by looking at their tools to backtrace what they do. Today, let’s explore “What is the Future of Work?” from a DAOist's point of view. We will cover old topics like AI, remote work, and fluid architecture.
My one and only Coworker is an AI Engine
DAOs can be a trojan horse for AIs to invade the heart of human organizations or our last hope against Superintelligence Sci-Fi Dystopia.
A long, long time ago, when I was still working as an intern, I noticed something special about Excel Spreadsheets. Only a 2% increase in my Excel skill improved my overall productivity by 20%. Fast forward to today, ChatGPT promises 20x the productivity.
DAOs can be a small current in the great wave of automation. Let’s look at Hats Protocol’s example, a DAO ‘productivity’ tooling. It increases the authority and accountability of each role in an org (Read More about The Tragedy of the Responsibility Commons). Hats are tokenized, non-transferrable ERC-1155 roles that can be delegated and revoked. Hats unlock certain powers (like if you have that Hat in your wallet, your wallet automatically becomes a Safe multisig signer or a GitHub repo admin, etc.) and hold the wearer accountable. Accountability comes from visibility and revokability.
Hats Protocol consists of… hats! 🧢🎩👒 There is an admin hat that can create and assign a new hat. Oracle hat(the admin or some other wearer or a third party) tells us if the hat behaved itself. The hat will be revoked if the wearer does not fulfill the predefined conditions.
Hats are made to fit smart contracts. Imagine an AI wearing one of these hats. It’s a ChatGPT plugin that can go online and orchestrate all other SaaS automation apps. An oracle hat would look nice on it!
Check out these popular use cases you can start with today:
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Metropolis is another DAO tooling with a similar approach, but the basic unit here is a pod instead of a role. Just like hats have a hierarchy and a tree structure, pods have a podarchy. Below is an example podarchy of ENS. Look at the pod configuration examples, and you can see how smoothly any org can incorporate AIs into its organization with a hat or a pod!
It’s not remote work. It’s just work. (And it’s ‘office work’)
The Great Depression ushered in the 40-hour workweek. US’s nationwide unemployment of 1940 legislated that the labor be spread and shared over more people. In 2020, Covid made us embrace remote work.
Remote work is the leverage for adopting how we do knowledge work: Deep Work. Deep work requires us to go through the initial stages before getting into the zone, like deep sleep. If we wake up in the middle, we start again from the beginning. Long sleep does not mean deep sleep.
So how do we collaborate without waking up our colleagues? Working asynchronously with documentation! A normie office anon spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email. I get existential crisis in most of the meetings by asking, “Who am I? Where am I?” We spend those time as human information routers. What if we can build a shared knowledge base instead? Wouldn’t you say deliberate thinking comes from written ideas rather than a heated roundtable?
DAOs dwell online with members from all over the time zone. So lots of DAOs have amazing documentation. BanklessDAO Writers Cohort has this amazing notion page containing everything I need to know.
Notice that some docs are linked outside the page? Curious to see where it might lead us? Let’s zoom out and check out the BanklessDAO notion page. It’s a decentralized and autonomous library for anyone willing to contribute to the org. No need to ping pong emails anymore, do your own (re)search!
The joke is on Annual Planning
Before my Web3 life, I worked as a regional sales manager. I couldn’t imagine a life without annual sales plans back then. My work life for the year was built around the plan that was made top-down and delivered to me. Why not a monthly plan? Because I first need an annual plan to divide it by twelve!
Though in times of socio-economic-cultural volatility, a company's survival may rely on not having such rigid plans to bind itself. Startups live and die by being ‘agile’ and do as many retrospectives as planning. DAOs thrive on spontaneity. Both Hats and Metropolis examples demonstrate fluid structure, but let’s add some fun with JokeDAO!
All DAOs play the coordination game, and JokeDAO is a Ready Player One. It’s a gamified, incentivized, and decentralized decision-making platform. The contests on JokeDAO are permissionless: anyone can give any prompt to the community and set an allowlist for the submission/voting right. (so some anon cannot hijack the contest. You can create a value-less community token and airdrop them)
The whole process is frictionless inside JokeDAO. The reward goes to the winner and the ones who voted for it. (More intro) If attention is the atomic unit of value, JokeDAO is the ultimate MVP. JokeDAO’s Proof of Concept, Jokerace, is happening right now. So get some $JOKE and try that joke! (The winning joke becomes a JokeDAO NFT and is a governance token for the Jokerace treasury. More info here)
The Kids Nowadays are Internet Natives
GenZ will comprise 27% of the workforce by 2025. They were born with the internet and have had smartphones ever since they had long-term memory. Whatever the future of work comes to be, it belongs to them. My bet is on internet native organizations.
What would work mean when we no longer worry about our basic needs? I will end with a solarpunk view over <Homo Deus>. Because almost all DAOs here are open source, waiting to be contributed and/or forked for the greater ecosystem!
feedback: @twinFin22
-fin
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