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pheloniusfriarSigns my brain is healing a bit from SARS-CoV-2 damage, I had an essay that I lost the original files for but wanted to share (it's probably in a compressed archive somewhere, or it could legit be lost), and finally figured out how to deal with it. It has been floating around in my "to do" list for years... the paper getting shuffled from one despair pile to another over and over again. I found it again when I was moving some papers today and did another search for the original... nothing... what to do to get it "out of my to do list"? I've been staring at the thing for years and finally today it occurred to me: scan it into a PDF and run OCR on it, then edit the text file and publish it on my blog (like the other essays I've shared). I use a program called PDF Studio because it allows me to edit PDFs (fuck you Adobe, seriously fuck you, you suck) and I remembered it had an OCR option. Scan. OCR. Save PDF (with text). Save as TXT. Edit. Save. Format in HTML. Publish. It is now off my do-to list, and is here to read if you are so inclined. It's from a course called "Technology and Society: Forecasting" and I wrote about the future of "currency" (cash, monies) in an age of "mixed reality" technologies (AR/VR/etc.). The goal was to take a 25 year horizon and speculate on what it would look like (2041 in my case here, the course was in 2016). It was overall a group project and we made a group presentation, but each of us had to submit an individual essay that we did on our own.
Technology and Society: Forecasting Currency
Rather than focus on a specific area of endeavour, our group chose to look at how currency could be impacted by mixed reality over the next 25 years. Currency touches every aspect of human existence, and with the continued assault of global hypercapitalism, neoliberalism, and renewed colonialism on several fronts, there is no reason to suspect that its importance to our day-to-day lives will not continue to increase and pervade every corner of our existence. The question then is, in what way will mixed reality technologies impact the way that currency operates, and perhaps even what it is in 2041 and beyond? All indications are that mixed reality will become entwined with, and in many cases drive, what future societies consider to be “value”. While 25 years is not sufficient time for such a transition to take place, both most of the group and I believe the world will be at a cusp by 2041. By that point in time, traditional forms of currency will start being supplanted by gamification systems accessed through ubiquitious and varied augmented and virtual reality systems associated with the delivery of “work units” in both cyberspace and in meatspace1.
In today’s world, currencies are created and maintained by nation states or, in the atypical experiment of the European Union, by nation states agreeing to use a common currency. For much of the history of civilization, various imperial ventures have provided common or defacto currencies to many nations for use both internally and in trade. “There are four key characteristics of [common] currencies: high unitary value; relatively low inflation rates for long periods; issuance by major economic and trading powers; and spontaneous, as opposed to planned, adoption internationally” (Lothian & Dwyer, 2002). In 2016, the major common currencies used are the US Dollar and the European Euro, but with the computerization of commerce, nearly all national currencies are given the same weight (if not the same value) when conducting online transactions. In meatspace commercial transactions, the local national currency is usually universally accepted, along with at least one of the world’s common currencies, if not both — but not all national currencies, if any others. It should be noted that when a nation is going through particular financial turmoil, sometimes that national currency is shunned in favour of common currencies which have a more stable value. It is interesting to note that credit or charge cards (e.g. Visa, American Express, etc.) are accepted for meatspace transactions around the world, and that they do any necessary real-time conversion between the local currency and the currency of the purchaser, whatever it might be. From that perspective, electronic transactions of this sort could be considered a primitive form of augmented reality, where traditional trading mechanisms have been augmented by ubiquitous networked computer systems from the point-of-sale terminal to the server rooms of the card companies. However, the value of currency depends where you are living in the world: the money received for any particular “unit of valuable work” depends on your socio-economic status, your gender, your ancestry, nationality, any number of ableisms, and so may other factors that do not affect the quality of your work relative to anyone else doing the same “unit of valuable work”. For some tasks, geographic location will remain a critical factor in performing the job — i.e. fixing a broken faucet in your house, or digging up a turnip — but increasingly, manufacturing, farming, diagnostic and repair functions, and even services such as the preparation and delivery of food will continue to require fewer humans to accomplish. Either society will continue on its trajectory of maintaining a permanent underclass that provides labour to a very small ruling class (the trajectory we are on now) — unsatisfying tasks where each person in that underclass performs increasingly menial tasks — or methods will be found to reward people based on their NetWorth (the value of the work they do as viewed from a network-centric/cyberspace positionality rather than the old meatspace/racist/sexist/etc-ist positions of today).
One can argue that this process of NetWorth has been going on for decades — perhaps not in the mixed reality sense being explored here, but tasks that were once the exclusive domain of the most highly trained individuals of Western nations on precious and expensive hardware are now being done in countries like India by over 3 million trained IT professionals2. Companies are still taking advantage of colonial/imperialist power structures to get comparable work out of professionals in India and other places for pennies on the dollar that would be spent in rich industrialized Western nations; however, there is an equalization process that does occur: high paying jobs in the West doing IT and software work have disappeared in favour of using outsourcing to designated resource-providing nations (human labour resources in this case). Furthermore, the existence of this outsourcing channel has encouraged management in Western countries to put downward pressure on local salaries, and to treat IT employees as disposable insourced resources. All of this undermines the long-term competitiveness of Western societies, and increased the competitiveness and skill of non-Western societies, and further equalizations will occur at the macro level globally through these economic and social pathways.
All of this is to say that the inequity of using neocolonial domination to leverage quality products for salt wages is unsustainable, and the spread of mixed reality technologies will hasten the erosion of such inequities. Sadly, it is likely going to be a huge “race to the the bottom” that will drive many Western jobs out of existence and lead to much instability; however, it will take more than 25 years for this to happen. With the disastrous and currently (politically) unstoppable climate devastation that will take place over the next 70 years (IPCC, 2014), in 25 years we will see these shifts in global power dynamics started to play out on a grander scale. This trend will be further enhanced by the continued integration of Africa into the global economy as part of the economic and political programme underway by China to undermine Western power there (Alden, 2005) and future-proof (in the medium term) its manufacturing dominance through those partnerships. The hastening of this dynamic and the equalization of compensation for work no matter where it originates will be hastened by the widespread adoption of mixed reality technologies in 2041. NetWorth will be one of the higher-order (Buschek, 2016) effects of mixed reality technologies.
Another higher-order consequence of ever more ubiquitous mixed reality technologies (e.g. smartphones to headsets to working surfaces and displays) will be a drive for the gamification of all human endeavour. Again, 25 years is not sufficient for this to have fully taken place; however, it was felt by most group members, and myself, that we will be at the cusp in 2041 where the subtle social changes brought about through mixed reality enabled gamification paradigms will start making deep inroads into the way human society functions, how work gets done, and how people are compensated for the work they do. To repeat a notion repeated several times in this class, and attributed to Simon Perry by N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler: “Our children will not call [this technology] virtual reality. They will call it reality.” (Donovan, 2016). The Internet was a novelty (for better or worse) to adults living through the 1980s and 1990s, but those who grew up in the 1990s and later see it as part of the basic infrastructure of their houses, their schools, their workplaces, and their lives. It has gone from a luxury item to a needed resource to function effectively in the modern economies of the West (and increasingly, everywhere). The generation growing up now will see mixed reality systems as just another basic element of existence; and as the Internet has grown to be an extension of our personal identities, capabilities, and value, so will mixed reality systems and the gamification of life it will bring.
Gamification of work is nothing new (Nelson, 2012), but it is the general and widespread availability of powerful mobile computers, cloud processing and storage systems, and common communication protocols (the World Wide Web, HTTPS, HTML5, etc.) that are driving new possibilities (Dale, 2014). Once again, the missing ingredient has been how to integrate gamification into our everyday lives, and this could not be possible until mixed reality technologies begin to move out of their infancy, which again I see starting to happen in a deeply impactful way around 2041. The insinuation of gamification into both commercial and social interactions is another inevitable higher-order consequence of mixed reality systems, and was portrayed in jarring clarity in the short film Hyper-Reality “where physical and virtual realities have merged” (Matsuda, 2016). In this vision of the future, Matsuda demonstrates how the unseen protagonist of the story (we see what they see) accepts their job assignments as a fully gamified experience, with points awarded for successfully completing both actual work and the myriad administrative details and microtasks required to operate in a society that requires work of its citizens to survive. What is also interesting is that there is a gamification of the protagonist’s social life as well, where automated systems indicate that they are not performing well in that aspect of their life, and offering advice on how to “play” better. Finally, Hyper-Reality indicates a future where workers don’t receive much, if any, national currency for the work they do. In the film, the protagonist gets to keep the reward points for doing tasks for others that they can then, presumably, spend to get goods and services for themselves as in-game rewards (where “game” here is “physical existence”). Even the game-derived notion of “levelling up” is presented as an aspect of how one might operate in a mixed reality, fully gamified, future.
It is at this point, that mixed reality, gamification of reality, and currency all come together. Hyper-Reality portrays someone performing menial tasks in return for credits that can be spent for presumably real-world items (although this is not portrayed explicitly, it is implied), and also presumably for non-physical goods and services like entertainment, education, training, and administrative services (e.g. interacting with government agencies for taxation, identification, documents, etc.). What I suggest is that the tasks that people can sign on to perform in a mixed reality setting (and in a gamified environment) are going to initially be menial or unskilled ones. However, as the game systems and reality augmentation systems become more sophisticated, people will be able to “level up” and be allowed to perform tasks of increasing complexity, and requiring actual training and proficiency demonstrations to qualify to do. The nature of the training would be very dependent on the nature of the work — some could be done purely online, where some require physical environments to learn and practice specific skills (a good example would be plumbing) — and similarly the demonstration of proficiency could be done purely online for some skills (possibly reviewed by humans that would be done as part of their gamified mixed reality enabled jobs). Some skills would have to be shown physically for safety-related or tasks requiring specific skills (here, flying an aircraft comes to mind as a good example of a skill that would need to be proved in person). I focused on infrastructure work for the group project and I envisioned people starting out sweeping streets and moving up the chain of complexity to critical infrastructure if they chose to go that route, where each level achieved would grant them greater autonomy and responsibility and greater rewards. Just like in many games today, people would earn proficiency badges that would allow them to receive assignments that required that proficiency at a certain level to accomplish effectively. As long as larger jobs could be broken down into smaller tasks, each of which would be tagged with the skillset needed to do it (which is the job of project managers these days), then game systems could dynamically and spontaneously assemble work crews with all the necessary skills (including, if necessary, dedicated supervision if it could not be monitored effectively with automated systems or remote operators) to perform an ever-increasing array of infrastructure-related jobs. In turn, those who do the tasks would receive points they could redeem to reduce city taxes, to pay for electricity and water and public transportation, or redeem through trading blocks for a global array of goods and services. And here is another higher-order consequence of gamification, which is itself a higher-order consequence of ubiquitous mixed reality: financial and commercial systems, and trade in general, will follow the evolutionary path followed by software systems. Specifically, such systems began as isolated systems and were federated over time through interoperability protocols, then distributed and decentralized through network-based technologies, and finally went from being explicitly functional systems to being service-oriented architectures. Rather than currencies being tied to the nation-state system, they will diffuse over time and ultimately become service-oriented systems, and access to services will be the value that is traded rather than the generic functionality of currency as it exists today. This will enable a NetValue type compensation system.
To conclude, I hope I have shown that mixed reality has worked in the world of 2041 to allow for a new paradigm of organizing and executing all the tasks necessary to run a functional society and global trade system — which should just be starting to unfold fully by then as a new generation that grew up with it operates effortlessly within it. 25 years on, I certainly see it as a success in many ways, not the least of which is opening up the possibility for a truly service-oriented valuation and currency system, and the opportunities this will bring to motivated people and societies all over the world. The negatives are the marginalization of demographics, societies, and individuals that cannot function effectively in this mixed media gamified future (much like how ineffectiveness with the Internet is an impediment today), as well as a “race to the bottom” in terms of compensation for tasks that are no longer limited to a small number of professionals or monopolistic guilds to perform. Finally, I will state that an unknown coming to pass will be the gamification of the mitigation and restoration ofthe environmental impacts of global warming, pollution, and the Anthropocene (Borenstein, 2014) extinction event. This will provide us with a much needed common purpose where individual effort really can have a positive global impact.
1 Cyberspace: occurring primarily through distributed networked computer systems and human/machine interfaces; meatspace: occurring where physical humans exist and operate, aka now as “the real world”. As was stated in class, “mixed reality will become just reality” — I actually believe that is true when you consider how augmentative technologies have been effectively incorporated into moment-to-moment existence in all human societies.
2 “2.97 mn professionals employed in IT-ITeS sector in FY13:Govt” (2013). http://www.rediffcom/money/report/tech-three-million-professionals-employed-in-it-ites-sector-in-fy13-govt/20130503.htm
Works Cited
Alden, C. (2005). China in Africa. Survival, 47(3), 147-164. http://doi.org/10.1080/00396330500248086
Borenstein, S. (2014). With their mark on Earth, humans may name era, too. Associated Press. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20141014/us-sci-age-of-humans-961f501908.html
Buschek, J. (2016). Risk Lecture (p. 47). Presented in TSES4002A class, July 20, 2016.
Dale, S. (2014). Gamification. Making work fun, or making fun of work?. Business Information Review, 31(2), 82-90.
Donovan, R. (2016). TSES 4002 SUMMER 2016 — Group Project - MIXED REALITY (p. 4). Course material for TSES4002A class.
IPCC (2014). Pachauri, R.K., & Meyer, L.A., Eds.. IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (p. 151).
Lothian, J. R., & Dwyer, G. P. (2002). International Money and Common Currencies in Historical Perspective (p. 26). The Independent Institute. Retrieved from http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=755
Matsuda, K. (2016). Hyper-Reality. Short film. https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
Nelson, Mark J. (2012). Soviet and American Precursors to the Gamification of Work. Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, 23-26. http://doi.org/10.1145/2393132.2393138
Comments by marker:
Interesting discussion of currency in the present and in 25 years, with the addition of mixed reality and gamification. Your delineation of the way currency itself will change, from the philosophy of ‘pay’ to the application, is telling. The positives are there, along with major social disruptions. It would have been interesting to hear a little more about the unknown potential consequences. You mention gamification in regard to the environmental impact of global warming, etc., but a bit more elaboration there would have been useful. Good discussion. 17.5/20 (87.5%)
Rather than focus on a specific area of endeavour, our group chose to look at how currency could be impacted by mixed reality over the next 25 years. Currency touches every aspect of human existence, and with the continued assault of global hypercapitalism, neoliberalism, and renewed colonialism on several fronts, there is no reason to suspect that its importance to our day-to-day lives will not continue to increase and pervade every corner of our existence. The question then is, in what way will mixed reality technologies impact the way that currency operates, and perhaps even what it is in 2041 and beyond? All indications are that mixed reality will become entwined with, and in many cases drive, what future societies consider to be “value”. While 25 years is not sufficient time for such a transition to take place, both most of the group and I believe the world will be at a cusp by 2041. By that point in time, traditional forms of currency will start being supplanted by gamification systems accessed through ubiquitious and varied augmented and virtual reality systems associated with the delivery of “work units” in both cyberspace and in meatspace1.
In today’s world, currencies are created and maintained by nation states or, in the atypical experiment of the European Union, by nation states agreeing to use a common currency. For much of the history of civilization, various imperial ventures have provided common or defacto currencies to many nations for use both internally and in trade. “There are four key characteristics of [common] currencies: high unitary value; relatively low inflation rates for long periods; issuance by major economic and trading powers; and spontaneous, as opposed to planned, adoption internationally” (Lothian & Dwyer, 2002). In 2016, the major common currencies used are the US Dollar and the European Euro, but with the computerization of commerce, nearly all national currencies are given the same weight (if not the same value) when conducting online transactions. In meatspace commercial transactions, the local national currency is usually universally accepted, along with at least one of the world’s common currencies, if not both — but not all national currencies, if any others. It should be noted that when a nation is going through particular financial turmoil, sometimes that national currency is shunned in favour of common currencies which have a more stable value. It is interesting to note that credit or charge cards (e.g. Visa, American Express, etc.) are accepted for meatspace transactions around the world, and that they do any necessary real-time conversion between the local currency and the currency of the purchaser, whatever it might be. From that perspective, electronic transactions of this sort could be considered a primitive form of augmented reality, where traditional trading mechanisms have been augmented by ubiquitous networked computer systems from the point-of-sale terminal to the server rooms of the card companies. However, the value of currency depends where you are living in the world: the money received for any particular “unit of valuable work” depends on your socio-economic status, your gender, your ancestry, nationality, any number of ableisms, and so may other factors that do not affect the quality of your work relative to anyone else doing the same “unit of valuable work”. For some tasks, geographic location will remain a critical factor in performing the job — i.e. fixing a broken faucet in your house, or digging up a turnip — but increasingly, manufacturing, farming, diagnostic and repair functions, and even services such as the preparation and delivery of food will continue to require fewer humans to accomplish. Either society will continue on its trajectory of maintaining a permanent underclass that provides labour to a very small ruling class (the trajectory we are on now) — unsatisfying tasks where each person in that underclass performs increasingly menial tasks — or methods will be found to reward people based on their NetWorth (the value of the work they do as viewed from a network-centric/cyberspace positionality rather than the old meatspace/racist/sexist/etc-ist positions of today).
One can argue that this process of NetWorth has been going on for decades — perhaps not in the mixed reality sense being explored here, but tasks that were once the exclusive domain of the most highly trained individuals of Western nations on precious and expensive hardware are now being done in countries like India by over 3 million trained IT professionals2. Companies are still taking advantage of colonial/imperialist power structures to get comparable work out of professionals in India and other places for pennies on the dollar that would be spent in rich industrialized Western nations; however, there is an equalization process that does occur: high paying jobs in the West doing IT and software work have disappeared in favour of using outsourcing to designated resource-providing nations (human labour resources in this case). Furthermore, the existence of this outsourcing channel has encouraged management in Western countries to put downward pressure on local salaries, and to treat IT employees as disposable insourced resources. All of this undermines the long-term competitiveness of Western societies, and increased the competitiveness and skill of non-Western societies, and further equalizations will occur at the macro level globally through these economic and social pathways.
All of this is to say that the inequity of using neocolonial domination to leverage quality products for salt wages is unsustainable, and the spread of mixed reality technologies will hasten the erosion of such inequities. Sadly, it is likely going to be a huge “race to the the bottom” that will drive many Western jobs out of existence and lead to much instability; however, it will take more than 25 years for this to happen. With the disastrous and currently (politically) unstoppable climate devastation that will take place over the next 70 years (IPCC, 2014), in 25 years we will see these shifts in global power dynamics started to play out on a grander scale. This trend will be further enhanced by the continued integration of Africa into the global economy as part of the economic and political programme underway by China to undermine Western power there (Alden, 2005) and future-proof (in the medium term) its manufacturing dominance through those partnerships. The hastening of this dynamic and the equalization of compensation for work no matter where it originates will be hastened by the widespread adoption of mixed reality technologies in 2041. NetWorth will be one of the higher-order (Buschek, 2016) effects of mixed reality technologies.
Another higher-order consequence of ever more ubiquitous mixed reality technologies (e.g. smartphones to headsets to working surfaces and displays) will be a drive for the gamification of all human endeavour. Again, 25 years is not sufficient for this to have fully taken place; however, it was felt by most group members, and myself, that we will be at the cusp in 2041 where the subtle social changes brought about through mixed reality enabled gamification paradigms will start making deep inroads into the way human society functions, how work gets done, and how people are compensated for the work they do. To repeat a notion repeated several times in this class, and attributed to Simon Perry by N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler: “Our children will not call [this technology] virtual reality. They will call it reality.” (Donovan, 2016). The Internet was a novelty (for better or worse) to adults living through the 1980s and 1990s, but those who grew up in the 1990s and later see it as part of the basic infrastructure of their houses, their schools, their workplaces, and their lives. It has gone from a luxury item to a needed resource to function effectively in the modern economies of the West (and increasingly, everywhere). The generation growing up now will see mixed reality systems as just another basic element of existence; and as the Internet has grown to be an extension of our personal identities, capabilities, and value, so will mixed reality systems and the gamification of life it will bring.
Gamification of work is nothing new (Nelson, 2012), but it is the general and widespread availability of powerful mobile computers, cloud processing and storage systems, and common communication protocols (the World Wide Web, HTTPS, HTML5, etc.) that are driving new possibilities (Dale, 2014). Once again, the missing ingredient has been how to integrate gamification into our everyday lives, and this could not be possible until mixed reality technologies begin to move out of their infancy, which again I see starting to happen in a deeply impactful way around 2041. The insinuation of gamification into both commercial and social interactions is another inevitable higher-order consequence of mixed reality systems, and was portrayed in jarring clarity in the short film Hyper-Reality “where physical and virtual realities have merged” (Matsuda, 2016). In this vision of the future, Matsuda demonstrates how the unseen protagonist of the story (we see what they see) accepts their job assignments as a fully gamified experience, with points awarded for successfully completing both actual work and the myriad administrative details and microtasks required to operate in a society that requires work of its citizens to survive. What is also interesting is that there is a gamification of the protagonist’s social life as well, where automated systems indicate that they are not performing well in that aspect of their life, and offering advice on how to “play” better. Finally, Hyper-Reality indicates a future where workers don’t receive much, if any, national currency for the work they do. In the film, the protagonist gets to keep the reward points for doing tasks for others that they can then, presumably, spend to get goods and services for themselves as in-game rewards (where “game” here is “physical existence”). Even the game-derived notion of “levelling up” is presented as an aspect of how one might operate in a mixed reality, fully gamified, future.
It is at this point, that mixed reality, gamification of reality, and currency all come together. Hyper-Reality portrays someone performing menial tasks in return for credits that can be spent for presumably real-world items (although this is not portrayed explicitly, it is implied), and also presumably for non-physical goods and services like entertainment, education, training, and administrative services (e.g. interacting with government agencies for taxation, identification, documents, etc.). What I suggest is that the tasks that people can sign on to perform in a mixed reality setting (and in a gamified environment) are going to initially be menial or unskilled ones. However, as the game systems and reality augmentation systems become more sophisticated, people will be able to “level up” and be allowed to perform tasks of increasing complexity, and requiring actual training and proficiency demonstrations to qualify to do. The nature of the training would be very dependent on the nature of the work — some could be done purely online, where some require physical environments to learn and practice specific skills (a good example would be plumbing) — and similarly the demonstration of proficiency could be done purely online for some skills (possibly reviewed by humans that would be done as part of their gamified mixed reality enabled jobs). Some skills would have to be shown physically for safety-related or tasks requiring specific skills (here, flying an aircraft comes to mind as a good example of a skill that would need to be proved in person). I focused on infrastructure work for the group project and I envisioned people starting out sweeping streets and moving up the chain of complexity to critical infrastructure if they chose to go that route, where each level achieved would grant them greater autonomy and responsibility and greater rewards. Just like in many games today, people would earn proficiency badges that would allow them to receive assignments that required that proficiency at a certain level to accomplish effectively. As long as larger jobs could be broken down into smaller tasks, each of which would be tagged with the skillset needed to do it (which is the job of project managers these days), then game systems could dynamically and spontaneously assemble work crews with all the necessary skills (including, if necessary, dedicated supervision if it could not be monitored effectively with automated systems or remote operators) to perform an ever-increasing array of infrastructure-related jobs. In turn, those who do the tasks would receive points they could redeem to reduce city taxes, to pay for electricity and water and public transportation, or redeem through trading blocks for a global array of goods and services. And here is another higher-order consequence of gamification, which is itself a higher-order consequence of ubiquitous mixed reality: financial and commercial systems, and trade in general, will follow the evolutionary path followed by software systems. Specifically, such systems began as isolated systems and were federated over time through interoperability protocols, then distributed and decentralized through network-based technologies, and finally went from being explicitly functional systems to being service-oriented architectures. Rather than currencies being tied to the nation-state system, they will diffuse over time and ultimately become service-oriented systems, and access to services will be the value that is traded rather than the generic functionality of currency as it exists today. This will enable a NetValue type compensation system.
To conclude, I hope I have shown that mixed reality has worked in the world of 2041 to allow for a new paradigm of organizing and executing all the tasks necessary to run a functional society and global trade system — which should just be starting to unfold fully by then as a new generation that grew up with it operates effortlessly within it. 25 years on, I certainly see it as a success in many ways, not the least of which is opening up the possibility for a truly service-oriented valuation and currency system, and the opportunities this will bring to motivated people and societies all over the world. The negatives are the marginalization of demographics, societies, and individuals that cannot function effectively in this mixed media gamified future (much like how ineffectiveness with the Internet is an impediment today), as well as a “race to the bottom” in terms of compensation for tasks that are no longer limited to a small number of professionals or monopolistic guilds to perform. Finally, I will state that an unknown coming to pass will be the gamification of the mitigation and restoration ofthe environmental impacts of global warming, pollution, and the Anthropocene (Borenstein, 2014) extinction event. This will provide us with a much needed common purpose where individual effort really can have a positive global impact.
1 Cyberspace: occurring primarily through distributed networked computer systems and human/machine interfaces; meatspace: occurring where physical humans exist and operate, aka now as “the real world”. As was stated in class, “mixed reality will become just reality” — I actually believe that is true when you consider how augmentative technologies have been effectively incorporated into moment-to-moment existence in all human societies.
2 “2.97 mn professionals employed in IT-ITeS sector in FY13:Govt” (2013). http://www.rediffcom/money/report/tech-three-million-professionals-employed-in-it-ites-sector-in-fy13-govt/20130503.htm
Works Cited
Alden, C. (2005). China in Africa. Survival, 47(3), 147-164. http://doi.org/10.1080/00396330500248086
Borenstein, S. (2014). With their mark on Earth, humans may name era, too. Associated Press. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20141014/us-sci-age-of-humans-961f501908.html
Buschek, J. (2016). Risk Lecture (p. 47). Presented in TSES4002A class, July 20, 2016.
Dale, S. (2014). Gamification. Making work fun, or making fun of work?. Business Information Review, 31(2), 82-90.
Donovan, R. (2016). TSES 4002 SUMMER 2016 — Group Project - MIXED REALITY (p. 4). Course material for TSES4002A class.
IPCC (2014). Pachauri, R.K., & Meyer, L.A., Eds.. IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (p. 151).
Lothian, J. R., & Dwyer, G. P. (2002). International Money and Common Currencies in Historical Perspective (p. 26). The Independent Institute. Retrieved from http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=755
Matsuda, K. (2016). Hyper-Reality. Short film. https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
Nelson, Mark J. (2012). Soviet and American Precursors to the Gamification of Work. Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, 23-26. http://doi.org/10.1145/2393132.2393138
Comments by marker:
Interesting discussion of currency in the present and in 25 years, with the addition of mixed reality and gamification. Your delineation of the way currency itself will change, from the philosophy of ‘pay’ to the application, is telling. The positives are there, along with major social disruptions. It would have been interesting to hear a little more about the unknown potential consequences. You mention gamification in regard to the environmental impact of global warming, etc., but a bit more elaboration there would have been useful. Good discussion. 17.5/20 (87.5%)
