Once people worked doing one thing throughout all of their lives. Then came the ‘job’ of which people could have more than one during a lifetime. Then came interim work, side-jobs and project-based work, further fragmenting activity patterns etc. Free agents networks of people renting out their skills and expertise as well as project-workforce matching sites popped up (e.g. Pajamanation, Rent-a-coder, etc.). From that point onwards, the situation atomized further, so now there are microjobs which have the size of a single task, some even that take mere seconds or minutes to fulfill. Amazon for example, has its Mechanical Turk service (named after the famous ‘chess-computer’) to allow for micropayments for human microjobs for which currently no automated system exists yet.

It makes one wonder about how this ongoing trend might alter our notions of work, time, society etc. as well as about what is next. Nanojobs?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:18 and is filed under business, future, society, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.