The Share-the-Scraps Economy

How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots' owners?Meanwhile, human beings do the work that's unpredictable - odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours - and patch together barely enough to live on.Brace yourself. This is the economy we're now barreling toward.They're Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel's on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap's on-line doctors.They're Mechanical Turks.The euphemism is the "share" economy. A more accurate term would be the "share-the-scraps" economy.New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they're needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability.The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.Consider Amazon's "Mechanical Turk." Amazon calls it "a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence."Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Robert B. Reich