Page 23 - INC Magazine-November 2018

in the work being produced. To win “To start off, you watch what they p
your employees’ trust, Coplin recom- are doing via the nanny cam, but after
mends taking an incremental approach a while you start to relax as you gain
to A.I. “Apply the algorithm to a small confidence in how they work.” SURfacInG
portion of the overall workload to give tokenomicS
humans time to see how the algorithm the end of Work as We know It?
works, and to build trust that the out- In the next decade,
come is what was expected,” he says. The growth of machine learning with- your customers will pay
for goods and services
One example he cites is a new in companies ultimately raises the type
algorithm-based table-booking system of existential questions that executives in ways that sidestep
traditional currencies:
a large restaurant chain implemented. don’t like to confront: How many of us with tokens, blockchain­
Initially, individual restaurant manag- will actually work with machines in enabled and distributed
ers were skeptical that an algorithm the future? units of value that
in the cloud could do a better job at The reality is that change is inevi- businesses can issue to
managing the tables than they could. table, so companies need to work on transact with customers.
To alleviate their concerns, the com- ensuring a soft landing for those cur- A current example is Civil,
a decentralized network
pany agreed to allocate just a small rently doing the type of functional or for news with for­profit
portion of available tables to the algo- repetitive tasks that automation can do and nonprofit arms that’s
raising capital through
token sales to fund some
“leaRnInG to tRUSt a.I. ISn’t of its work. Those who
that dIffeRent fRoM When yoU own Civil’s tokens can use
them to start their own
eMPloy a neW BaBySItteR.” newsroom on Civil’s
platform. And they can
also use those tokens
rithm, and if the managers were happy better. For some, that may mean to barter with others on
with the results, more tables would be retraining or upskilling staff to get the Civil’s platform to, for
added. After starting with a pool of most out of their institutional knowl- instance, build out adja­
cent services and apps.
just 10 percent of available tables, the edge and experience. Others, however,
managers quickly realized that not will inevitably find employees auto- The value of tokens is
set by their issuer, but that
only did the algorithm do a great job, mated out of a job, just like those at value won’t rise unless
but it also freed them up to do more Foxconn, which in 2016 replaced there’s market demand for
useful tasks. 60,000 workers with robots. them. Think of them as a
Stephen Ufford is the co-founder Yet, as we look to the long privately issued currency
and CEO of Trulioo, an A.I.-powered term, could it be that the fears of that skirts traditional issu­
global verification service to support automation-induced mass unemploy- ers, so what was once
controlled by governments
financial services’ anti-money- ment have been overblown? After all, will soon be available to
laundering monitoring. Traditionally, the next generation of workers—the all, thanks to blockchain
this important area of banking security Alexa generation, for want of a better technology and clever
was handled by human workers, but term—will already be used to living cryptocurrency entrepre­
increased computing power and the with and learning from machines. And neurs. In the near future,
sheer volume of digital data now being these new workers are showing signs we’ll see new token­based
business models, which
produced have left them outnumbered that they are more motivated by the could revolutionize not
and outgunned by criminal gangs. experiences, freedom, and creativity
only how payments are
Now, algorithms like Trulioo’s scan they can have in their work than by made but also pricing.
millions of transactions at a scale no conventional incentives. That’s because blockchain
human could manage and are trained “Two of my grandparents worked technology can facilitate
(by humans) to spot potential fraud or in factories, yet my grandfather also micropayments with no
transaction costs: No
block suspicious individuals. loved to paint,” says Ufford. “Shouldn’t
When dealing with something as work harness that creativity rather smart merchant should
accept a two­cent credit
sensitive as identifying fraudulent than crush it?” It could turn out that card charge, because that
transactions, Trulioo’s employees machines, in the end, are the mass cost is higher than the
had to be certain the algorithm they creativity catalyst we’ve all been price. But future busi­
had built wasn’t showing any bias in waiting for. nesses might charge tiny
its decision making or making rogue amounts for certain goods
recommendations. “Learning to trust MATTHEW YEOMANS is the author of and ser vices—all facilitat­
ed through tokenomics.
A.I. isn’t that different from when you Trust Inc.: How Business Gains Respect
—AmY Webb
employ a new babysitter,” Ufford says. in a Social Media Age.

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