This topic emerged through a screening of emerging issues in science, technology and society in the context of the FET CSA OBSERVE.

http://www.horizon-observatory.eu/radar-en/index.php

The big picture

A number of items captured in the OBSERVE radar reflect on emerging new modes of production and consumption and the related societal and technical transformations:

Time as money

Artist Gustavo Romano carried out a series of actions in public spaces utilizing a mone-tary system based on units of time (Spot#1. Lost time refunded, Spot#4 Buying time, Time Notes). Offices and other performances have been set up in many cities of Europe, America and Asia. The actions refer to different local and global issues: the exchange systems, the over-employment and unemployment, the increasing virtualization of the economy, and the existential relationship of the human being with his own lifetime. Source: Exhibition: A brief history of the future

Postcapitalist economy

Several developments point towards the emergence of new “postcapitalist” economic models such as “commons based peer production” with the internet and automation among the driving factors. Source: Aggregation of several;

Global Challenge: Transnational organized crime

Global challenge: Problems of organized crime show themselves in many views: drugs (trade), trafficking, corruption, cyber-criminality. The total organized crime income could be over $3 trillion. We need global strategies!

Source: The Millenium project - State of the Future;

Distributed collaboration platforms

Around the world citizens self-organize to research and address challenges such as energy-supply, waste-disposal, weather- and threat-monitoring or bee dying. These "peer2peer" initiatives need platforms to safely collect, manage and process data and resources in a distributed and collaborative way. At the same time technical solutions that allow orchestrating large numbers of distributed specialists at short notice and thereby enable new collaboration and service models such as Application Program Interfaces (API) and blockchain technology are receiving a lot of attention.

Source: 2015 CAPS Conference and several;

The work needed

Naturally, the focus in this domain is on economy and policy concepts. Nevertheless, several sources stress the need for technological innovations to provide infrastructures for novel modes of production and consumption such as commons based peer production. Others emphasise the need for innovations in regulations and laws for governing the new patterns.