MAKING A Future Scotland

BUILDING THE CAPACITY TO DISCOVER THE FUTURE

We are witnessing massive technological and organisational disruption of our economy and workplace. Already we know a major European bank looking to downsize from 50,000 to 800 employees, along with new organisations like Buurtzorg (a neighbourhood care organisation) being born – which have 10,000 nurses and only 50 people in HQ.

These are early signals for how the rise of platform, automation and AI economies are driving the demise of the administrative HQ and the birth of the post managerial economy. They are refocusing the added value of human contribution to our economy and society, and fundamentally disrupting the rise of the managerial city over the last 30 years and the value of labour.

We are witnessing a massive transition in value creation from the means of production to the means of market curation. Take for example Uber: here the taxi driver is a bare commodity and interchangeable. The real value creation instrument is Uber as platform that creates and curates the market. This principle now extends from retail – Amazon – to manufacturing – AliBaba. This reality signals a great transfer of value creation from the relatively distributed means of production to the massively globally centralised and privatised means of market-making and market curation. The implications of this are massive, for inequality and the scaling of precarious citizenship.

Over the course of the next 10 years, we are likely to see the simultaneous need to mitigate and manage impacts along with the structural need to reduce carbon production and consumption by an order as yet un-envisaged. Cities are the epicentre of this transition – both as major drivers of carbon consumption whether food and construction or logistics and travel, and as places seeing direct impacts like climate extremes and public health impacts, the cost of food, and a growing climate related refugee crisis.

How will we democratise the necessary transition, how will we use this transition to create new lead markets and nudge, compel or otherwise invite people to new behaviours?

Technology has not only disrupted how we operate and work but also broken and bypassed how, what and who we govern. Our governance model is broken: we live in a ‘systemocracy’ – a world of massive inter-dependency, yet we are holding on to 19th century versions of governance. This creates the illusion of sovereignty and supremacy – acting as a denial of the complexity we must confront. We need a new governance model which acknowledges our global inter-dependence at all scales & focuses on the quality, diversity and integrity of feedback in all its natures, whilst recognising the future is real- time and negotiatory. For us to move forward structurally, we need massive reform of our model of governance – reinventing it for the 21st century. Traditional regulatory bodies and accountability mechanisms may not be well suited to managing the emerging tensions between industry and society in a digital age. The challenge of propagating innovation while also protecting public goods and detecting new public harms, is not yet solved. In a world where platforms and tech services cut across national borders, products and services evolve rapidly and continuously, and consumer technologies diffuse at incredible speed with large risks of unintended consequences – the pace of analogue regulatory design is unable to keep pace. We need to support and drive governance innovation – experimenting with algorithmic policy; imagining new processes for legibility, legitimacy for algorithmic policy & compliance; building the public infrastructure and protocols for this future. But we must not see as a new means to control but as pathway to accelerate distributed, decentralised, democratised innovation for the civic good and shared accountability.

Technological disruptions are challenging the fundamental skills of society, but what is being disrupted is not the plumber or craftsmen but the middle classes – the management, administrative and intermediary skills. “Uber did not disrupt the taxi driver – it started by disrupting the cab office”. This heralds a fundamental disruption in human contribution to the future economy and needs us to reimagine our human development institutions, from neighbourhoods and nurseries to adult education institutions – to focus on emotional intelligence, resilience, capacity to learn and unlearn, craft behaviours, creativity, care, complex collaborative skills, and human machine integrated agency.

We are witnessing a shift in our understanding of what being human means, and a new comprehension of violence. We now understand the impact of air pollution as molecular violence, with systemic effects on the health of humans. We can now correlate emotional violence and racism with literally taking years off people’s lives through persistent raised levels of cortisone; and we now know poverty reduces IQ by up to 13 points, and its effects get transmitted biologically across generations. How will cities deal with a growing sense and realisation of such systemic molecular injustice? How will we advance a next generation of human rights and welfare to address these structural inequalities, focused on unleashing the full capacity of all citizens?

As our economy shifts from being built on tangible assets to intangibles (as was very well articulated by Jonathan Westlake and Stian Westlake in their recent book Capitalism without Capital), land is an increasingly powerful tool in harvesting the value created.

The correlation between the dramatic increase in the value of land in the UK and its transition towards an intangibles economy is significant and has, ironically you could argue, massively facilitated the capture and concentration of new forms of value by a very old and concentrated class of wealth – subverting the near “natural” democratisation of new value creation, and accelerating the concentration of inequality and driving the economic precariousness we witness around us.