My father had one job, I've had six, my kids will have six at the same time

If you have in-demand skills then maybe the 'gig' economy can be a nice place to be: money and flexibility can create quite a nice lifestyle, if some comments I read on HN are to be believed.

But for those not in the top-layer its going to be "welcome to the precariat" [1]. Constant hustling, unpredictable income and housing, moving-on a lot, fewer social ties. For those at the bottom it's zero-hour contracts driving for Uber and stacking shelves at Amazon fulfilment centres.

Traditional full-time jobs provide a lot of the security necessary for long-term commitments like raising children, educating them properly (so that they in turn have sell-able skills), and engaging/participating in society. When almost everyone is chasing the next contract to pay the rent, the result can be a hollowed-out society where we all end-up poorer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

One problem I can see in all this is that the trust networks that the sharing economy is built on are all (currently) privately owned and exploited, and network effects mean that it is very difficult for any competitor to get established in the same space because they have to establish their own competitor trust network. As a result the tendency will be for there to be a winner-takes-all outcome creating monopolies around the trust network in any particular vertical. See Facebook (network of trust around friendship), Uber (network of trust around giving/receiving transportation), Ebay (buying/selling goods), AirBnB (giving/receiving accommodation), Twitter (trusted sources of interesting opinions) etc. The only competitive strategy that seems to be working at the moment is having a vertical that is sufficiently different from the incumbent that you can attract existing users of the incumbent's network to use yours in parallel.

I doubt this is an outcome that governments and society in general will find acceptable when they start to recognise the pattern. Instead I wouldn't be surprised if the second phase of this economy involves government regulation of the trust networks, with them being extracted into some kind of trust infrastructure on which a number of competitor service providers are allowed to operate, or at least opened up so the trust network data has to be part of the public commons. At the moment the trust networks are (rightly) seen by the companies as being their most important asset - I think we'll eventually realise that, in the sharing economy, trust is so important that it cannot be privately owned.

Yeah, I feel in general it develops in that way. More flexibility, less specialization. But I don't think it's really good though.

If you have a core set of skills and tasks you can often work very efficient. You know who to talk to, you know what to do, and if you spend time optimizing your work process after some time your daily life also is not too stressful. But if you always switch and hunt the opportunities you don't know much about anything. You always have to continue hunting.

But on the positive side I think it will be an option, at least in a foreseable future. Being flexible also means you cna say no to an opportunity if it is too far away from what you are usually doing. Of course that also requires more discipline than in the past.

Concerning money I think it depends on your talent/skills/education if it goes up or down. Talent becomes more rare when people do more different tasks (e.g. the "full stack devopser" can only know a little about web development, because there are so many other things he needs to know). And higher flexibility for employees means that companies have a harder time to keep talent. Therefore pay must go up for talent. But someone who barely gets by doing one job now has an even harder time doing 6 jobs at the same time, and he has a harder time to hide due to more responsibility on his side, and last but not least more flexibility also means companies don't need to keep you. Below the tipping point money goes down.

If one likes that or not probably depends on if oneself is above or below that tipping point. I can understand both sides here. No reason to discuss just the negative side.

Capitalism is about the flow of capital. Most people don't have capital, so they have to trade their labor for a small amount with people that do have capital, who are only trading it to get more capital.

Articles like this assume that everything will change - except how capital works.

Bitcoin. Crowdfunding. Distributed banking. Mass market barter transactions.

I can't help but think that centralized stores of capital (i.e. the top layer, the rich, the capitalist, etc etc) are naturally going to become obsolete.

Unless, of course, they're kept alive by force.

Maybe 'a job' is something that fitted a particular phase of our civilisation development and it just will fade away? A hunter gatherer (I bring this as my example - because as a species we spent most of our time in that phase) would do many things - but we would not call them jobs.

I believe that "spreading yourself too thin" is a real thing, and a real disadvantage. In a theoretical world, you could have a specific specialization that you used in isolation for many different jobs simultaneously, but in reality, a "job" is about so much more than one individual skill. There is onboarding, learning the people and environment and tools and product that you work on, and a variety of other peripheral matters that require much of your time and learning curve before you get to apply the skill you've been hired to perform. And thus you end up with a lot of time spent on things that wouldn't be an issue if you concentrated on one job at a time for a decent period of time.

Personal anecdote: my dad used to work in a coal mine during the day, then drove a delivery truck in the evening, then during the weekend he worked at a local cafeteria, selling ice cream. He always thought I was being lazy not doing anything after coming home from my 9-5 job, and not having a second job on the weekend was almost sacrilegious. My point is that some people don't see the world the way this article describes them :P

Looking at a lot of job ads they want 5 developers for one job: sys admin, dba, software dev, ui, design...

The statement “My father had one job in his lifetime, I will have six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.” makes a pithy statement but is generally not true.

My father had about 6 jobs in his working life. Looking at my uncles they varied in the number of jobs but none of them had just one, over a working life of more than 40 years each. Thinking wider still, I cannot think of a single person in my parents generation that had just one job.

It might be that people average more jobs today than they did in the past. Maybe you can project that forward and guess that a future generation will average more. But to say 6 concurrently is wild speculation and hard for me to take seriously.

There is no reason to think our children will have many concurrent jobs. Certainly no more than people do today.

+1 for The Guardian article and this discussion thread. I see the automation and replacement of jobs as one of the central problems.

I am mostly retired now so I spend more time mentoring (mostly) young people on CS tech, job market, choosing a career path, etc. Two common lines of dialog are what tech they have a passion for and the other is what tech is least likely to be automated. I may be optimistic in that I hope that a life process/system of continuous education and keeping in mind what types of work help society the most will see the younger generations through some 'interesting' times.

> it seems strange to me that we would always recommend to companies that their revenue streams are diverse, yet for individuals, the smallest and most fragile economic unit, we say: you must only do one thing all your life. What a crazy way to live; 87% of people in full-time employment are not passionate about what they do. When I look at this new way of work, I think of it as opt-in. It gives people economic agency, it puts them in charge. And it gives them flexibility. People love those things.

I don't think people love these things as much as they love security, at least in the long term.

Every generation goes through this. Journalists act like Millennials are special people who won't be held to a 9-to-5 job like everyone before them, but they've made the same mistake as journalists who covered previous generations. Before these "gig economy" Millennials, we had "hippie" Baby Boomers and "slacker" Gen-Xers.

Young people of every generation are always going to say they don't want to live a traditional life like their parents, that they're going to chase their dreams and be genuinely different, and they join whatever the latest counterculture is. But, ultimately, they come back.

The hippies of the '60s and '70s became the yuppies of the '80s and the soccer moms of the '90s. Why? They want that sweet, sweet security. A boring job with a steady paycheck and loads of benefits means you don't have to worry about anything, as long as you come to work every day and don't spectacularly fuck up at your job. If you're planning to start a family, then you need the stability for your kids. If you're not, then the stability helps fund your life so you can spend the weekend enjoying your hobbies instead of worrying where your next meal is coming from.

Mark my words, in a decade the "gig economy" rumspringa will be over, and most of those people who chose to bounce from gig to gig for "flexibility" will be working in cube farms so their kids can have health insurance and go to good schools (and those of us without kids will be doing the same thing so we can indulge in expensive hobbies on evenings and weekends).

Oh, of course there will be holdouts, just like there are still hippies who live on communes well into their 60s, but by and large the gig economy will fade away once most of the original participants are out of their 20s, and pop culture will treat the "aging Millenial hipster" as a joke just like the "aging hippie" is treated now. And, of course, we'll see the beginnings of the next rumspringa as the next generation of young people decide they don't want to be like their parents... until they do.

Strange that BlahBlah is made to seem so hot when ZimRide had to convert to Lyft to make any headway. I wonder if ZimRide overstepped their transition, or if BlahBlah executed better, or if Lyft is simply a richer pot.

What is interesting is that Lyft chases the taxis and BlahBlah chases the trains, or the other way around, depending on your loyalties.

Still, as the old adage goes, lots of people do have the same ideas around the same time. Winners are much more unique than that.

I wonder what the last human will think once s/he becomes automated out of existence.

And their kids will have 36.

It is more likely your kids will have no job.