IT'S WHAT YOU DO FOR 6 HOURS AT WORK ALREADY:

With the release of the globally popular The Third Wave in 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler presciently predicted a massive shift from industrial to information-driven economy and the blurring of traditional economic roles resulting in a new class of participant he labeled the "prosumer" (producer plus consumer).

We've clearly been transitioning to an info-driven economy in which knowledge workers are in high demand. Much of this has been catalyzed by new classes of systems like social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, G+), social-driven search (Google, Bing, Siri), citizen science (SETI-Live, Cell Slider) and big data that increasingly harness consumer-generated data while returning value to users in the form of organized information, entertainment, and occasionally cash (Google is paying select users up to $25 in Amazon gift cards to monitor Internet activity, Viggle is paying people for their TV viewing data). The result? An emerging prosumer class.

While today's prosumer jobs pay little and fall into the informal category, there is reason to believe that they could grow in volume and value--rapidly. As accelerating change enables companies to get better at capturing, storing, transferring, processing and valuing user data, the prosumer role is poised to proliferate and scale.

New interfaces (iWatch, Google Glass, BCIs, Facetime, Kinect, Surface, search engines), sensors (FitBit, smartphones, data recorders in cars, reactive billboard cameras, camera-equipped drones), compression technologies, and faster computer processors are accelerating human-driven input. Social media, search, info-warehousing, banking, research companies and universities are collecting and mining vast amounts of this input. These developments are expanding the market for data that can be more easily applied across industries and converted into money, which in turn is increasing the demand for prosumers that can input, sort and output this data.

But what about the 1.8 billion jobs that people need now? In one sense, they're already here.

Over the next decade, companies appear ready to pay more users more money for real-time and longitudinal life-streaming, driving, brain, health and genetic data; for product reactions, media reactions, geographic scans, species scans, general behavioral data, and so forth. More informational value will be captured on-the-fly as people socialize, consume media, learn, play games, navigate the world, or even sleep. Considering these near-term likelihoods, we can confidently predict that data-driven, prosumer-centric capitalism will steadily augment or even grab market share from the traditional 9-to-5, single-role, industrial economy.

A more extreme version of this scenario is that this transformation of capital flow and economics, something that Toffler explores in detail in Revolutionary Wealth, could become an outright boom. Billions of formally unemployed or underemployed humans could prove necessary for the rapid development of new technologies spanning medicine, entertainment, transportation, farming, warfare, search and artificial intelligence.

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