Employment

For any law-abiding citizen who’s in the system, there is no real need to get a job. A UBI, or Universal Basic Income, is distributed to all in the form of 1,000 electronic Credits per month. This income, though meager, is enough to pay for a small living space and enough food to keep you alive. Anyone who wants to do better for themselves can earn additional Credits in various ways.

Because of this, most people in UbiquiCity are free agents, small entrepreneurs, independent contractors or crowdsourced laborers who work less than twenty hours a week, under contracts that are executed strictly on a job-by-job basis. While on the clock they’re organized around specific projects, with new people entering or leaving the project team as dictated by company needs and priorities. People tend say they’re “attached to a company at the moment”, not “employed by a boss”.

The Gig Economy
Most citizens of UbiquiCity live in a permanent Gig Economy. Instead of forecasting demand and pushing resources into production and distribution, the most successful companies create scalable “pull platforms” which change in response to changing demands, acting as needed pull the required resources together for whatever project may arise. These platforms engage massive networked communities, and they are the drivers of strong feelings about loyalty, preference and lifestyle. Marketing and image reign supreme. Companies have their own “cultures” and they communicate their cultural values in everything they do. Corporate cultures are often faddish or spammy in their constant attempts to drive trends. Some – especially in the entertainment business – are little more than an air of mystique around a central individual, group, or design.

Smart Contracts
A “Smart Contract” is a blockchain system that facilitates, executes and enforces the negotiation of legally-binding agreements. In the job market, smart contracts are implemented by AI agents that negotiate with crowd-based workforces for jobs, managing the distribution of tasks and micropayments. This distributed workforce shares the available resources to complete the job, and the income is distributed among its participants. Your value to a distributed workforce is determined by a combination of price, hardware and Reputation (see The Reputation Economy in the Economy section).

Thanks to HR AIs and Smart Contracts, many gigs are filled and agreements executed without two humans ever talking directly to each other.

Jobs for Humans

 * Social workers, nurses, therapists and psychologists are among the least likely occupations to be taken over as assisting and caring for others, which involves empathy, is a crucial part of the job.


 * Roles requiring employees to think on their feet and come up with creative and original ideas, for example artists, designers or engineers, hold a significant advantage in the face of automation.


 * Additionally, occupations involving tasks that require a high degree of social intelligence and negotiating skills, like managerial positions.

Although over half of all jobs once performed by humans are now performed by machines, many companies – especially smaller or struggling ones – can’t afford the expense of automating. For these companies, it is still cheaper to employ humans; especially unskilled humans who don’t expect a great hourly rate. Jobs in this market include cleaning, farming, textile work, quality assurance and parts assembly. Operating at a lower level than their automated competitors, these companies stay in business by cutting their profit margins, or by finding clients who prefer human workers. Such clients do still exist, though they’re usually eccentric, and few in number.

The Human Touch
Other jobs remain the domain of human practitioners simply because customers prefer a human touch in certain areas, even if a machine could just as well do the job. These jobs often tend to involve some degree of verbal communication or intimacy: nuanced conversation, interpersonal relationships or emotional surrogates, close proximity, sex, psychoanalysis, bedside care, ethical or legal arguments, etc.

On-the-Job Training is All-the-Time
Just as the shifting economic landscape made it difficult for old-school companies to remain specialized, the constantly-accelerating rate of technological advance makes it difficult for a person to focus on a single job for the majority of their life. Instead, individuals and corporations train for skillsets, and apply these skillsets to problems as they arise, forming project teams as necessary. Corporations are keen to keep their workforce learning new skills, and tend to give greater responsibility (and pay) to the most adaptive individuals over time. Your intelligence and job performance may be monitored and assessed by automated QA systems (hovering drones or roaming AIs that follow workers around).

Augmented Knowledge
Cognitive abilities (such as advanced sensory processing or mathematical computation) can be enhanced permanently or temporarily using a combination of nanotech, microscopic sensors and cyber-devices.

Many jobs that once required large amounts of empirical knowledge have been reduced to expert-systems databases with visual displays or human-language search interfaces. Instead of looking to hire a person with a specific skill, corporations will often just “augment” an existing employee by giving them access to an expert system. This access may be remote (via PDA or computing device), or the expert system may be copied to a dedicated chip and embedded within the body of the employee.

Non-Corporate Jobs
In addition, let's consider that not everyone who has a "job" is employed by a corporation directly; there are plenty small cottage industries that exist with or without the RP economy. A person who inherited a material recycler hires a bunch of neighborhood kids to do advertising, and makes toys for them. A self-taught programmer creates a game played on low-range networks that rivals the popularity of mass-produced software. Four scrumblies start a band using instruments they scavenged from a derelict sprawl, and start writing songs that become locally popular. A person who built a still opens a "speakeasy" serving old fashioned hootch. A person who's a master of growing tomatoes might have a specially-designed hothouse and people will trade good stuff for a ripe tomato. etc.

Getting Found by a Job
For those who seek wealth through corporate employment, the methodology of the human resources department has been drastically altered by automation and AI.

Everything known about your online behavior and digital transactions – your name, location, age, gender and other traits, plus your reputation points and citizen points, as well as your datawake, your social networks and other information – can be found by AI systems (or diligent WakeTracers). They typically begin their search by scanning the social web to find all your profiles, and branching off from there. They may potentially review every post, photo, video, blip or comment you've ever released, in addition to various transaction records and marketing databases with which you've been associated. They can recognize behavioral patterns, interpret images, and parse comments, using (mostly) legal data. The output of this analysis will be a fairly detailed profile on you, which is then rated against the requirements, priorities and flexibility of the employer.

One advantage connected citizens have is that they really don't have to job-hunt very much. Because so much data is quantified and available via the Fog, and because big corporations share data in so many ways both overt and covert, your skills and general values can be easily discovered by a specialized HR AI. This means jobs can come to you, rather than you having to go to them. Here’s how it works: A CEO tells their HR system what sorts of skills and profiles they're looking for (and conversely, what they’re not looking for), then the HR system contacts the CitySystem, which accesses the Cloud and returns a list of potential people for the job. The HR system then can contact all of these people and make an offer immediately.

Ways to Make Money
See Ways to Make Money

The Unemployed
See The Unemployed