DEVELOPMENT

4 The Afd2025 scenarios
Box 6
Collaborative economy or new fragilities?
Foresighting for Development
Development agencies, steering through future worlds. Afd2025
I
Connectivity has created a global digital marketplace on which labor is bought and sold.
When artificial intelligence proves unable to perform a task, then worker 2.0 takes over
and deals with it. Connected to businesses via platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical
Turk, hundreds of thousands of workers compete for tiny repetitive jobs offering no pay
at all or a few euros at most. This virtual, assembly-line type of work also skimps on
notions such as minimum wage and participation in any kind of social protection. And
the tasks involved are those that computers still cannot handle: pinpointing the ambiguous
or ironic tone of a text, advanced image recognition, transcribing an audio file... What’s
more, the tasks are intended to help improve and train the algorithms (machine learning),
so that the computer will be able to perform the task itself some time in the future and
eventually further whittle away the need for human intervention.
Crowdsourcing has also appeared as a solution to one of the biggest problems of the 21st
century, i.e. categorizing and organizing the massive amounts of information generated
by the Internet. Some experts and advocates of crowdsourcing also acclaim the efficiency
of the new generation of crowd-work platforms, be it for their capacity to distribute work
to people from all geographic horizons or the possibility they offer to those wishing to
top up their income. Without supervision or regulation, these new methods for
organizing work will likely be factors that aggravate social exclusion and inequality
in the near future, rather than being of use to society.
Responsible for the accelerating number of natural disasters and health crises, climate
change does not impact societies to the same extent in different parts of the world. The
more fragile regions are the most affected, but science and ongoing adaptation programs
headed by the wealthiest countries have enabled significant headway in the fight to deal
with the effects. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of migration and climate refugees has
been on the rise over the past fifteen years and population displacements are intensifying
at all scales. This situation leads to increasingly severe tensions in the less vulnerable
countries and/or those spared by climate change (mainly northern Europe), and reinforces
the tendency towards protectionism.
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