FUTURE. Imagine waking up in 2035 with a robot serving you breakfast, your smart house operating by a code and that you are receiving a message about your salary paid in cryptocurrency. Often it is a matter of time before things that are seen as sci-fi today will become a reality tomorrow. Artificial intelligence, algorithms and analysis of different data processes are already influencing our everyday lives and shaping the future. In his latest book, Dr Mark van Rijmenam pedagogically and easily explains such development in “Organization of Tomorrow. How AI, blockchain and analytics turn your business into a data organization”.

Van Rijmenam’s book is foremost a business book with instructions for entrepreneurs and small-business owners. The book contains basic and instructional information about how to understand and operate with the latest technological trends. If the reader is not familiar with aspects as machine-learning (AI), blockchain, algorithms, tokens, smart contracts and decentralised autonomous organisations, the book offers a very detailed and pedagogical approach.

Nevertheless, what makes the book more unique and sophisticated is that it contains philosophical discussions and futuristic reasoning. As an entrepreneur, but also as a general reader, one can learn about how AI and blockchain are fitting in social and civilisational contexts of human development.

One of the book’s most ground-breaking sentences is that in the future whole companies and businesses will be governed by a code. According to van Rijmenam, the current transformation from later industrial society to a post-industrial society is also driven by a process where we are shifting from computer-assisted work to human-assisted work but also higher levels of human-machine interactions.

After all, as Van Rijmenam’s points it out, the usage of the technology depends on our human construction, sensemaking and interests. A particular keyword in the book is sociomateriality – regarding how human interactions are influencing the technology and vice-versa.

Another insightful aspect of Van Rijmenam’s book is that it goes hand in hand with the latest philosophical narratives such as metamodernism. As opposed to post-modernism, the metamodern narrative is focusing on ”co-values” as co-creation and co-operation rather than competition and struggle. Therefore, in the book, one will find reasoning why the current blockchain development is going to stimulate new economic trends and behaviours where collaboration is as more vital and crucial comparing than competition.

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