To solve the problem of mass unemployment from automation, profits and tasks must be shared with everyone.

Employers could swiftly solve this by sharing the profit gains from automation with their employees, allocating paid time for upskilling, and democratizing the workplace. However that would mean reduced profits and greater costs, both of which are kryptonite for any business.

A global economic protocol which autonomously routes tasks directly to the person or bot with the required skills, would ensure a workforce resilient to automation by giving workers the choice of ondemand tasks while simultaneously upskilling. The key to achieving this is for individuals to work for skill-based cryptocurrency tokens, enabling the economy to be aware of their diverse skillsets and to accurately rank those skills across a distributed network – this is the goal of Peerism.

Yes, automation is definitely a good thing for humanity as a whole. In an ideal system the automation of tasks frees people to work less, to enjoy their lives, to pursue passion projects, creative or scientific endeavors, to maximize leisure time, family and community activities etc.

However within our current economic system, the fruits of automation are not evenly distributed. Those who own the AI algorithms and robots directly benefit via the profit gains from automation of human labor. Yes, this will result in cheaper goods and services. But the pain felt by individual families deprived of income and the societal chaos resulting from mass unemployment will be dangerously destabilizing to global peace.

We're already witnessing the beginnings of this pain with the rise of precarious work, 200 million unemployed, 600 million 15-24 year-old NEETs and 1.4 billion people in vulnerable employment, including the reversal of life expectancies in the US.

It's expected that at least 47% of all jobs globally will be automated within the next decade, with those in the "developing" world to be hit hardest.

Your university/college degree, CV/resume and LinkedIn profile says very little, if anything, about your actual proficiencies, diversity of skills or interests. If you have a degree in economics and 4 years working at Acme Corp, that says nothing of your talents in #astrophotography or that you spent most of those 4 years browsing Reddit. Also your qualifications are not universally recognized across country borders or online platforms (good luck transferring badges between MOOCs).

By earning skill tokens for each piece of work performed, you're able to level-up a unique and diverse skillset. As a result your skills become quantifed, ranked and transferable anywhere across the decentralized Peerism economy.

As individual skills are quantified, we're able to match paid tasks to anyone in the economy with the relevant skill level. For example, if you've earned 9000 #3dprinting tokens then you're likely more proficient at 3D printing tasks than someone with 100 #3dprinting tokens.

Employers willing to pay a higher price will be matched to individuals with higher skill levels (or more skill tokens). When a task is received, the economy instantly routes it to the feeds of matched individuals where they can choose to claim it or pass it on. No need to shop around for service providers, request quotes, or communicate via multiple layers of marketing and sales teams.

The pace of technology is so rapid that we can't predict jobs of the future. University/college or any formal educational curriculum is incapable of teaching diverse and unknown future skillsets; only peer-to-peer learning can. Skill tokens are attached to skill/interest communities where people can share ideas and discuss content. Creating a new skill token and community is as easy as creating a new subreddit or Facebook group. By engaging with those communities you can also earn skill tokens.

In addition to paid tasks, you're able to submit unpaid tasks in order to ask for direct help. For example, you've just received a #html task and you're having difficulty with it, so you put out a request for help. Instantly you're connected with a peer who has the same or slightly more #html tokens to their name. They help you out, and you both earn a few extra #html tokens.

Both. All skill tokens are floating cryptocurrencies paired to their parent tokens which are all paired back to the PEER token. The advantage of this approach is that each skill token can develop a market value for that particular skill. For example if $solar tokens are worth more than $coal tokens then that reflects the future promise for that micro-economy and the demand for that skill.

When an employer (which can be anyone) posts a task, they can choose to pay $50 in their local currency (USD, AUD etc) which will convert into a specific number of tokens for the particular skill they're requesting. For example a USD$50 task to design a logo might earn you 5000 $logo tokens (USD$0.01 each). You can either withdraw the $50 or stay invested in $logo tokens.

Also once an individual's basic income needs are met, perhaps the acquisition of skills (not $) will become the primary goal, allowing the gradual transition to a post-money society.

Blockchain is the underlying technology which powers Bitcoin, enabling the storage and transfer of information in a distributed and decentralized manner. Checkout this video to understand the blockchain in 2 minutes.

While Bitcoin is intended primarily for financial transactions, Ethereum takes this a step further by allowing anyone to easily build their own decentralized applications (dApps) which can perform all types of functions as well as create new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Thus governments and central banks are no longer required to issue secure currency or dictate monetary policy. Checkout this short video on Ethereum: the World Computer.

We use Ethereum to power the decentralized peerism protocol and to enable: user-created skill token cryptocurrencies, decentralized identity, distributed user content and comments, distributed skillsets ledger, distributed tasks ledger, tasks-to-skills matching exchange and more.

The Universe and all of life evolved through self-organizing, organic and emergent processes; atoms become cells become organisms. In fact our current global economy and the Internet itself are already self-organizing entities; their properties emerge from the individual transactions and interactions of humans and machines.

Rather than fighting to control the economy from the top-down, the peerism protocol instead designs policy with emergence in mind. All code and protocol rules/policy are focused at the individual level to allow complete personal autonomy, while carefully employing incentive mechanisms and network effects to produce an emergent outcome that is positive for the whole economy, and others within it.

For example if peerism only offered skill tokens, then it's inevitable that what will emerge are the same issues of wealth inequality within capitalism. Thus at the core protocol level we must collectively decide to include other small policies/rules which remove incentives to hoard and which share wealth through individual interactions. At a community level we'll also experiment with allowing communities to design, vote and deploy their own protocol policies as a way to rapidly discover those which produce the most positive emergent outcomes for all members.

Peerism is an entirely new breed of economic and political ideology that can best be described as "social decentralism" whereby a social protection floor and collective order emerges from self-organizing individual interactions on a blockchain-based protocol. There are aspects of capitalism, communism, socialism and others within the protocol.

As job losses from automation reach a crisis point, it'll provide the catalyst for the transition to peerism. In simplistic terms: without the wait or approval of governments we'll launch a distributed economic protocol (decentralism), which will offer everyone jobs and profit (capitalism), then create a marketplace for commons-owned bots to automate tasks (communism), then share those profits with all (socialism), allowing individuals the time and financial freedom to create their own self-organized P2P society (global and local).

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a replacement to welfare whereby governments issue an unconditional fortnightly payment to all citizens. UBI is great as a way to decouple work from income and free people from wage slavery. However it's a short-term solution to the automation crisis as it doesn't solve the problems around helping individuals find their purpose or preventing rising wealth inequality. Also if a UBI is distributed by a government or central authority, then it risks becoming a powerful future political weapon for class warfare at a global scale.

Shared profits from commons-owned task automations will fund a form of decentralized universal basic income and universal basic credit to be introduced in phase 2 of the Peerism protocol.

Another commonly suggested solution to automation is to apply a "robot tax" whereby companies pay a tax on their automations which would then be used to either fund re-training or a basic income. Not only would enforcing such a tax be practically impossible (try cataloging all algorithms, AI and robots); if one country implemented the tax while others didn't, then naturally companies would just move their operations.

Another suggestion is a "job guarantee" whereby governments would fund and create public sector jobs such as community work or social care. This is a great short-term solution for lowering technological unemployment, and eases the fears of those who believe a basic income would create a "lazy" class. However a job guarantee is a patronizing, top-down central planning approach which denies individuals the freedom to pursue their own unique skills and interests. This results in a much less diverse and resilient workforce; and when all legitimate roles are filled it's likely to produce committee-created "bullshit jobs".

Yes and no. Peerism does enable everyone to instantly become a freelancer without the usual hassles of registering a business, marketing yourself, writing proposals and competing in a bidding war to the bottom. Instead tasks are routed directly to individuals with the required skills, who can then one-click claim or pass it on.

Unlike existing online platforms for work or education, Peerism is an open, non-profit economic protocol with zero fees. Developers are free to power their applications using the Peerism protocol without permission. Users have complete control and ownership of their data, and are able to instantly switchover to any app within the Peerism economy.

Yes we have gig-based services like Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, mTurk and Deliveroo. However these are low-skilled, low-paid, exploitative and demoralizing for workers. Also the little (if any) new skills learned or reputation earned are non-transferable between platforms.

Peerism enables people to pursue all of their unique passions, level-up those skills among their peers (unpaid and paid), and receive higher pay the more they upskill. Instead of bidding for tasks, individuals have the power to claim or pass-on tasks that are matched directly to their skill levels. This removes the typical price bidding race to the bottom, and employers have an incentive to pay higher rates for better work. Individual skills, data and reputation are recognized and transferable across the entire economy.

Any individual is able to become an "employer" by pushing out a task request and being instantly connected with someone who has the skills to solve it. So if you happen to receive a task that is too big to handle yourself, then it's easy to bring in help. In addition it's likely we'll see #project and #manager skills develop with people who can manage temporary teams to complete large projects.

The Peerism protocol is designed to be simple and universal allowing developers to power any apps they can dream of with the protocol. Our proof-of-concept peer.ai app will be useful for certain types of tasks, but perhaps you can think of a better UI/UX to coordinate a group of #chefs or #designers. Simply build it on top of Peerism and get user permission to access/update their data and tokens.

It's said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It's redundant to compete against a bot or AI that can do the same task but faster. In phase 2 we'll be introducing a bot+human hybrid model whereby humans and bots work together to solve tasks.

When a task is received, first the bots tackle it and if they can't solve the task, then it's routed to the humans. AI will continue to gradually automate tasks, however the humans within Peerism will have a diverse spectrum of skillsets and interests to gracefully fallback on.

Wealth inequality is dangerous for human progress. Eight men now control more wealth than 3.6 billion people. Automation is a great thing for society as a whole, but one of the primary reasons we fear it is because the AI algorithms and robots replacing our jobs are owned by our corporate employers. When your job is automated and you're let go, your salary/wage simply becomes profit for your employer.

There will be individual profit incentives to create bots which automate tasks across the Peerism economy. However all bots will be owned by the commons on the blockchain, and 50-90% of those profits will be shared back into the communities. We'll also be experimenting with ways to discourage hoarding, to maximize individual basic income and credit to ensure money never sits idle.

The more tasks a community automates, the greater the chance of shared profits, thus the higher the token value will increase. The outcome will be huge investment by speculators, many new individuals upskilling within that community, and more bots created. As a community begins to near full automation, the tasks passed through to humans will decrease, the speculators will exit and the humans will fallback to any of their other skills whose token values will follow a similar process.

As the commons-owned bots automate a large chunk of tasks globally, the profits shared to individuals could become so vast and distributed that money no longer becomes a human concern (post-money or post-scarcity). At this point, the skill tokens would organically decouple from monetary value and instead represent human social value in the form of individual interests, ideas or passions.

Right now we need feedback and community support for the peerism concept, and developers to build out the protocol including a proof-of-concept work app called peer.ai. After that we'll launch an ICO crowdsale for PEER and PEERAI tokens to raise funds to continue development of both non-profit projects.

This is a collective project that will require the input from everyone in our global society with various views, backgrounds and skillsets. Join the Discord, Telegram, subreddit or Facebook Group to help shape peerism and solve one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.