A Dream of Interpersonal Computing
Steve Jobs had a vision in 1990 and discussed interpersonal computing.
If you spend time on the video above, you will realize that he demonstrates a personal computer much like your iPhone in the modern day - the goal is to do everything in one place.
You still have a physical device you carry on to work with.
What if you have a digital or virtual machine with everything on one platform?
According to Steve Jobs, we are at the third explosion with a faster business condition changing faster and faster.
The third one is starting to happen now. And the third one is let's do for human to human communication what spreadsheets did for financial planning and what desktop publishing did for publishing. Let's revolutionize it using these desktop devices. And we're already starting to see the signs of that. As an example in an organization, we're starting to see that as business conditions change faster and faster with each year, we cannot change our management hierarchical organization very fast relative to the changing business conditions. We can't have somebody working for a new boss every week. We also can't change our geographic organization very fast. As a matter of fact even slower than the management one. We can't be moving people around the country every week. But we can change an electronic organization like that. And what's starting to happen is as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great user interfaces, we're starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task in a.. literally in fifteen minutes worth of setup. And these fifteen people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are geographically. And no matter who they work for hierarchically. And these organizations can live for as long as they're needed and then vanish. And we're finding we can reorganize our companies electronically very rapidly. And that's the only type of organization that can begin to keep pace with the changing business conditions.
Let's explore his idea and compares it to the current digital environment:
Business conditions
Like Steve Jobs predicted, 32 years later, business conditions have changed faster thanks to social media and information technology advancements.
Stagnation of the organization setup
He also is right about the hierarchical organization that prevents business adaptability due to managing frequently changing, and geography has limitations.
The ideal organization
An ideal organization will have:
clusters of people
work toward common tasks
a short period of coordination, like 15 mins
no matter geographically
no matter hierarchically
organization can live for as long as they are needed
organization can vanish if they are not needed
reorganize companies electronically
Let's talk about DAOs
https://twitter.com/CamiRusso/status/1569464456358526977
You may be surprised that DAOs are precisely what Steve Jobs's ideal organization is in the real-life example.
Last 30 years or so, we have been creating and exploring tools that allow us to work in the ideal organization if possible.
Now, we are trying to build an ideal organization to fulfill the vision.
Here is some vision of the DAOs in the near future:
the organization will be decentralized with its purpose to survive and vanish when its purpose has been fulfilled
workers are gig type without a full-time job status
people work together without geographical and hierarchical constraints
you may never know your co-worker's identities or even see them face to face
you compensate by results rather than hours
you verify experience from blockchain digitally
you will never need to write a resume to apply for jobs
you will not need a degree to start working
...
The list can continue, but we need everyone to join and make the vision come true.