Knowledge work will shift to on-demand cloud infrastructure
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Sam Lessin, Founding Partner at Slow Ventures, discusses how software and centralized infrastructure will structure white-collar knowledge work similarly to compute clouds.
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“And I think, you know, the future of work probably looks a lot more like this kind of cloud metaphor where, you have kind of the ability as a firm or as someone who needs to get a task on a turn on or turn off capacity. Utilization can go up. You know, you have all these benefits of kind of the centralization and management of human beings doing the work they need to do with incredible tools around them to be much more efficient than they could possibly be in a decentralized environment. The factory part of it, the knowledge work is just this idea that like right now almost all work is done piecemeal. Factory work, when you're making a thing, there's a process, it's measured, each step is done by a different, you know, specialized unit. But knowledge work, I mean, most of it's done completely ad hoc in any which way with very little measurement, with very little tools, and so I kind of think the other piece of this is going to be that knowledge work is going to kind of go from this pre-industrial putting out system in a lot of ways to kind of a much more structured system where human beings can focus on the most human parts of tasks, and machines can kind of pipeline and build the infrastructure around them to make them more efficient and higher quality.”
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