Gareth Priday
is talking with
I wonder what the future of work holds over the next 10, 30 or 50 years? I think technology (e.g. robotics) and social changes (e.g.demographic shifts from Boomers to X'er and Gen Y's in the work place) will drive a lot of change but I'm worried that other factors say, the P2P movement, might be being overlooked. Is the Time list complete? What comes after their 10 year horizon?
I've put a bit more here as well
storify.com
I’d like to start by simply discussing what everyone thinks are the key drivers for the future of work. Once we get going I’m hoping we’ll find some lesser explored spaces and hopefully move on to do some collective analysis.
To start, as I mentioned above, I think there are a few technologies on the cusp – robotics and 3d printing to name but 2. Walking about today it was difficult to spot someone doing something that couldn’t be at threat from some sort of talked about near-ish technology. It felt a lot like “humans not necessary” article below.
but this seems as odds to me with the resource and general energy constraints that we may face in the not too distant future. I started to wonder is this ends up as a messy hierarchy with very poorly paid people at the bottom, then the technology available to a few, and perhaps in some instances (like retail) a top end of human interaction?
I want to acknowledge some of the work that Julien and his colleagues at SAP have recently down on this topic. He tells me there's a report coming, but there's lots on their community network blog.
scn.sap.com
Interesting. There are a few themes here that were in some of the posts from yesterday like this one..
slideshare.net
Which looks at productivity rather than time as a measure of work, virtual teams and choosing when and where to work. The "is your gadget the boss" reference made me think of this..
tinyurl.com
Where a possible next step is the 'gamification' of work. I could see this kind of approach being used ensure 'productivity' targets are met...and your gadgets reminding you if they haven't been.....? What do you think?
Julien also noted to me in a private email that the End of Work is something he's interested in - relates to that 'Humans Not Necessary' article you posted.
I just don't see who is advantaged by getting rid of work... in terms of power elites.
Gareth, you may be on to something. The gap between the increasingly cognitive jobs on the one hand and the unqualified jobs on the other hand may keep growing, and will be filled with robots.
What does that mean for us humans? Let's look at the first industry that was entirely disrupted by robots: agriculture. I think the figures I heard was that in 1900 52% of the US population was working in agriculture, as opposed to less than 1% today. Those jobs have gone somewhere obviously. There were no web designers or personal trainers in 1900. The same process has been going on for a while with manufacturing jobs, and has started destroying IT jobs.
Now, the question is, is this time around different? Are we close to automating near everything humans may need? Or will humans always come up with new ideas of things they need?
For example: how many people, after watching the Curiosity rover on Mars, would be ready to pay the prices of a holiday for a few hours of steering a rover remotely on Mars? Pay an extra and have a photo of your family beamed onto a flat red rock? A few more dollars to have your names engraved with laser on a Martian rock for future explorers to discover? "Bob was here in 2012. LOL". Is interplanetary graffiti the next bubble?
My money is on human inventiveness. Unless the robots take over obviously.
I'm interested in why we humans choose to work more and more when we don't really have to as tech/robots could do most work soon. If the "End of Work" is to happen we will have to replace the things we get out of work with something else. The sociologist Anthony Giddens gives 6 reasons why we work:
a) Money
b) Activity Level – the work place is a structured environment to acquire and exercise skills
c) Variety – do different things from home chores
d) Temporal structure – we get a sense of direction in daily activities
e) Social contacts
f) Personal identity and self-esteem
If we can find these 6 in other activities/stimuli then maybe the End of Work is coming soon. What do you think?
Looking over the material we’ve collected and have been putting out I noticed that not only was much of it was technology driven that it tended towards either – there will be new jobs (occasionally no jobs in a good ‘star trek’ kind of way) or no jobs in a really bad way. That brought this article to mind;
actionableforesight.wordpress.com
and it struck me that what I’m seeing across these articles was “bifurcate the future into positive and negative stereotypes – utopia or dystopia” So where is the ‘messy bit’? What are the combinations which hold both of these? The hierarchy was the one which immediately came to mind.
More generally it puts in one of the other themes, the move to networked organizations, where the notions of a return to smaller local modes of production (the local 3d craft shop) or rising “with the machines” is quite strong.
edgeperspectives.typepad.com
But what I haven’t really seen yet in these future images so far are P2P means of production as a mature parallel mode of production and ‘work.’ This style would fill b) - f) of Gidden’s list above just not a). May be it depends on whether we want to think of ‘work’ as employment and jobs or something more?
I am hoping we’ll avoid interplanetary graffiti though!
I'd like to throw in the work by Jamais Cascio here - he talks about the 'pink future' and I find this an interesting idea. He is with the rise of the robots..." Jobs where empathy and "emotional intelligence" can be considered requirements, often personal service and "high touch" interactive positions, have by and large been immune to the creeping mechanization of the workplace. And here's the twist: most of these empathy-driven jobs are performed by women."
I think this is the messy bit - the end point may or may not be robots, depending on the rate of the energy transition required. But even if it is robots - the nature of work itself is changing, what is valued now may not be valued in the future. openthefuture.com
That's an interesting piece, I've just listened to the interview as well which is interesting when it gets going.
live.huffingtonpost.com
This is slowly filtering through the grey matter, but what springs to mind is that the other type of 'work' that might survive is anything that's creative in the sense of engaging our emotions (performance, marketing, song writing, etc). I'll ponder some more on what new areas of might be valued in the future which aren't now. Does anyone else have some suggestions?
The economist John Maynard Keynes gave a 1930 speech predicting a 15-hour work-week: jacobinmag.com
Robert & Edward Skidelsky revisited Keynes' forecast in their new book How Much Is Enough?
nytimes.com
So, the 'future of work' has a prehistory.
Anyone who thinks that we will reach the end of work, has never had or taken care of a three-year-old. So long as there are three-year-olds in the world, there will always be “work”. And given that procreation is an imperative.. well, we can imagine the rest...
But on the serious side, I would distinguish the whole question of futures of work into three or four categories.
1 - work based on perennial needs on the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy
2 - work based on the needs of a planetary civilization - eg creating closed loop urban / resource metabolisms, addressing climate change, peace and collaboration between nations
3 - work based on emergence / superfluous needs better cooked up by marketing and technology companies
4 - and of course work based on inner needs for love, growth, spirituality, connectedness and all the other fantastic things that we actually lived for aside from 1) survival, 2) planetary survival, 3) what other people tell us makes us happy.
The end of type 1 work is based on assumptions of abundance of, or infinite, energy. Basic needs like food, shelter, and all the other things on the lower end of maslow's hierarchy, will remain, much of which is labor or energy-intensive. For example much of the fruit that urban Australians eat and take for granted comes by way of backpacker coming to Australia for “adventure”. if we think automation and robots will solve this problem, we are assuming a miraculous abundance of energy resources.
Perhaps the Chinese will solve all our problems, by mining Helium3 from the moon :)
For type 2, Keynes could never have imagined the environmental catastrophe on the other side of the industrial miracle. Emancipation in type I leads to the global, complex wicked problems sustainability industries. if, like in type I we are basically dealing with survival, type II is just a different more complex sort of survival, planetary survival. is survival in type I can be considered work, then why shouldn't every hour we put into addressing climate change also be considered “work”. Whether or not we get paid?
Which raises the question, can we narrowly defined work as connected to pay?
But the joy really seems to be in the emergent, superfluous and deeply meaningful, type 3 and 4, perhaps for tomorrow night if the categories still make sense.
enjoying these musings and everybody's posts, thanks
BTW - Branch doesn't automatically add the information in the invitation request as the first post. Please could you post those contributions again? Thanks!
Just for fun I've been plotting the various items we've been tweeting on a timeline here...
docs.google.com
I've also added in a few more general scenarios (e.g. Shell and DHL) for comparison purposes. A far from a complete list but just in cases it's of interest...I've also left this version open just in case anyone wants to take a copy, etc
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving” - Einstein. The way I relate to his quote is Thriving / constantly evolving / going beyond what was normal yesterday is the norm. That, in my opinion has helped us be relevant for so long. Of course there will be a drastic change of roles and automation will take over those which we focus on today, so that we can focus on new ones tomorrow. What is critical is the mindset which drives this evolution. If it is a "thrive" mindset, then it will create innovation, help us create awareness of ourselves and how we impact the external world and learn to live in "abundance" If however, we move into "survive" mode, then we risk making work and life far more "fight or flight"
One of the things I noticed putting together the timeline I mentioned above, is that the more general scenarios (e.g. DHL scenario 4 Paralyzing Protectionism) tackled some of the possible collapse states which I hadn’t found in the initial set of images we’d collated (maybe scan bias). Starting to look for those specific images, I found this.....
futures.hawaii.edu
...Jim Dators challenge to the ChosunBiz Insight Forum in 2010 which ends.. “while I very much hope that our dreams of a high tech Dream Society will come true, we will be irresponsible if we do not also devote equal time, talent, and money to assessing the contours of a Survival Society as well.”
I think a “thrive” mind set is very important and I also think it’s worthwhile exploring the transitions and downturn alternatives. If we woke up in a world which looked like..
- The pink collar work world
- Or the paralyzing protection world
- Or a mature P2P style world
What would be the impact on “work”? (I’d really like to know what people think for each)
And if we get to the “Dream society” where work has been “un-invented” where might we find meaning in the sense noted above?
Hi Abhijit and Gareth,
Dator's macro scenarios (not scenario archetypes but his actual reading of world dynamics and their potential trajectories), are both relevant to futures of work discussions on 'thrive' or 'survive'.
1. Business as usual (survive for majority world, thrive for slowly growing middle class and above)
2. Discipline (survive for most, thrive within the survive? - using P2P approaches?)
3. Collapse (everyone just trying to survive, many failing)
4. Transformation (everyone thriving)
Note that structure is the episteme / way of knowing here - eg reality of political economies and interactions with people / ecosystems. Eat your metaphors G. Lakoff.
An overview of his thinking is here: actionforesight.net
On behalf of Sobuzzart who has just joined us .."There is a small book/text called "Le droit à la paresse" (french for "The Right to be Lazy") written by Paul Lafargue who was a socialist and Karl Marx's son-in-law in which he highlights the paradox of our modern societes where technology is replacing men and women in the working tasks little by little, though they still work more and more to earn less, very instructive..."
Just read the note by Jim Dator's note - loved it ! My response is as follows : Allow me to define "Thrive" as "invent future outcomes - prefered future" and "Survive" where we think the future will just happen to us. So, from an evolutionary perspective I see the big shift from "survival/robotic/mechanical" work to "meaningful/purposeful" work where one is more aligned to one's vision of a preferred future and society is broadly in that direction.
Ah, nice clarification, thanks Abhijit
Thanks Jose ! Just finished watching your Jim Dator interview - I am positively enthused about the Future Studies work as it resonates very deeply with me :) Very thankful to Gareth for this conversation !
So glad, there are lots of masters programs out there if you want to study more: wfsf.org
Hi Abhijit, No problem! and thanks for participating. Futures is a great field...but be warned once you've taken the futures pill there's no going back.... ;-) BTW - I'm hosting this for "theforesightepidemic" we've been pushing out related information on twitter at @4sightepidemic
So in a "Pink Collar" world, the only jobs left for non-robots are the ones requiring human empathy. Jamais suggests some evocative points - the pay for caring professions (kindergarten teachers, elder care, psychotherapists) skyrocket? Will men start muscling in on these traditionally female professions?
But how on earth would there be enough work in those categories to sustain everyone?
I'm not convinced by the idea that vast automation mean that people get a living wage paid by the "robot tax" Jamais refers to - which is really a tax on the very rich people who own the robots.
So, perhaps we're looking at a future with affluent professional women, mega-rich magnates and millions of roaming, income-less men.
(I'm tempted to also agree with Gareth's point about performance arts lasting along with caring professions, but the sophistication of 3D games animation and things like Pop music automation – en.wikipedia.org - make me wonder how long before most of the feature fim and pop music industries are automated. What's the difference between Ke$ha and a robot anyway?)
DHL's Paralyzing Protectionism is a return to a world with no global material trade: resource and fuel scarcity, high tariff barriers. It's like the 19th and 20th centuries didn't happen.
Which means lots of local jobs in subsistence economies. Lots of old-fashioned "work".
Also nothing in the scenario collapses the internet, so there's no reason to believe that global knowledge work goes away - in fact people who can access the global knowledge resources might even be more valuable. Getting patterns, designs and ideas from around the world and applying them locally might be good business.
I think a P2P future for many Futures people is almost our Business As Usual. We're like a deer-in-the-headlights thinking about all the possibilities.
Surely in this brave new world, most people aren't working for large institutions and corporations. Surely as pension funds dry up and a new generation of Free Agents (fastcompany.com) move into working life, coordinating and collaborating projects through open platforms, funding them through community funding sites and out-competing Leviathan through agility and sheer motivation, right?
Only churches and the public service stays as a hierarchical organisation, commercial work is all done by small "pirate bands" of 3-12 people and independent contractors.
I'm jumping in without having read yet all previous contributions, just the last one by Tim, and I agree with his assessment. I think the key word is 'distribution', both knowledge and material infrastructures are being mutualized and are becoming efficient at a lower scale. But I think it is useful to distinguish two basic scenarios. One is simple 'distributed capitalism'. In this scenario, we have 3d printing, crowdfunding, social lending, etc .. but used within a capitalist logic, with the same underlying motivations. Things will change, but less radically than in the second scenario: commons-oriented business models and economics. In this scenario, I would see much greater improvements in work-related happiness, meaningfullness, ...
Test - I tried to post something and branch something yesterdat, but neither worked. And although I have responded to both Branch and to The Future of Work my name is still greyedd oout on the list above. Andrew
Twore relevant projects: The first one produced scenarios about work based on how knowledge was produced and who owned it. (Don't jump to conclusions about what we meant by 'knowledge'...) www2.orange.co.uk.
The second one, for Dell, was a shorter piece of scan and analysis - within a big research study by TNS - which identified a number of conflicts about work (partly about technology, but only partly.) content.dell.com
Finally (I didn't add this to the comments) I don't think you can look at the future of work without taking a view on the argument about 'precarity' and the precariat: this is the wikipedia entry - en.wikipedia.org. The sociologist Guy Standing published a book about it last year: policy-network.net.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your comment and sorry you had trouble getting on. If anyone else is having an issue commenting please send me a message at @phoenix_time and I'll resend the invitation.
I think there might be a counter-trend to the free agent concept Tim mentioned, which can grow stronger if the large institutions and corporations get their shit together soon.
The leader here is Google, who seems to promote the old-school model of life-long employment in the same org. with a new promise of real human development at work.
Would you rather choose to be a flexible free agent who works in cafés and trusts the crowd to fund your projects, or to work for a Leviathan with a monthly regular pay check, free lunches and mindfulness sessions by Jon Kabat-Zinn?
Or maybe both?
Thanks Adam.... further to this hybrid and building on Tim and Michel's comments... a Leviathan that holds the structure for free agency.
The Leviathan is such by virtue of global scale capital pooling... Google's IPO let it go on a spending spree.
So I would echo Michel Bauwen's distinction between peer to peer that is human scale and allows for re-investment into community commons and peer to peer which has venture finance or shareholders behind it - a kind of p2p rentism? "You can be free and we even give you an allowance / benefits, but we get 25%"... a kind of kickstarter gone very ugly.
But hey, don't complain, you get a desk and free yoga sessions!
which by the way is not my preferred future!
The paralyzing protection world could see this reverse trend in a wild sort of way - e.g. physical and food security become employee benefits - heading towards a kind of corporate feudalism - you work, your other family members can contribute time to the corporate farm in return for food...
(BTW - in the detail it does mention that the internet get broken up so the money would be in stealing the patterns and designs..)
More to Adam's point I think there is a tension between the benefits of "freelance freedom' and 'precarity' as Andrew mentioned. With Corporates more able to allow flexibility in location and hours there is a benefit to a 'steady job'
I'm also wondering where do notions of 'management' and 'leadership' sit? (I was thinking pink collar but it could apply elsewhere) An what about entrepreneurs on one hand the ability in an automated world to build something new is cheaper, but the hurdle rate to ownership of the 3d printers, etc (and materials) is great....
May I recommend:
'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work'
by Alain de Botton.
As regards the future of it, precariousness and uncertainty occur in most life circumstances, not just work and/or business.
Work is, however or whatever you define it to be, especially in a post-econoclyptic downturn/recession/zero growth scenario.
The precariat is a very popular topic in academic research at the moment, and it may have inter-generational effects: forbes.com
On Gareth's distinction of management and leadership I recomment Henry Mintzberg's recent book Managing which studies what managers actually do, and how leadership is often conflated as being more transformational (courtesy of James MacGregor Burns' influential study).
Tim raised the dotcom era Free Agents: this occurs in fragmented industries (such as television editing and desktop publishing/web development) with project-based work where contractors may not have bargaining power --- unless they have specialised skills and can negotiate more effectively. Thomas Frank's books are a good counter-point.
Thx Alex for those valuable information , I'll check them
On the Precariat theme, this Gawker series on the unemployed (currently at part 7) has some chilling stories of the economic underclass: gawker.com
Alex, are you aware of anything which looks at precarity in Australia? The US situation seems very stark, I'm wondering how things look here.
Tim: Annie Delaney and Donna Buttigieg at Melbourne's Victoria University are looking at precarity in Australia and India, and they have mentioned a few other researchers are looking at Australia.
Thanks to everyone for the comments and contributions so far. We’re hoping that some of you may be interested in moving on to do some collective analysis of the different themes that have emerged in the conversation so far. The intention is for anything produced to be feedback into this conversation i.e. made public. If you’re interested in attending a google/skype session to start the process then please let us know if you can attend at one of the times listed below. If these times don’t work for you but you are still interested please can you put a note in the comments field. Cheers, theforeisghtepidemic team.
doodle.com
To elaborate on the format for Friday’s session, we are hoping to choose 1-2 themes from those which have emerged in this conversation. Then use the ‘futures wheel’ as a straight forward method to expand on those themes. 5pm (Melbourne) on Friday is the most popular time so we’ll stick with that. If you’d like to attend please can you RSVP on the doodle link above by noon (Melbourne time) tomorrow (Thursday). We do need a minimum number of people to go ahead, so we’ll confirm if it’s happening shortly after that. Cheers theforesightepidemic team
Hi Gareth
Thanks for keeping us on track. I look forward to the friday session if we get the numbers.
José
This is a simply brilliant RSA animation on the work of Daniel Pink: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - FORA.tv bit.ly - really relevant for futures of work discussion
I'd forgotten about this one, good pick up! I think it links nicely with Adam's comment about the counter trends.
Tomorrow is a go! For those participating please can you forward your skype details to openforesight@gmail.com so we can link you into the conversation Thanks!
Unfortunately we've had some drop outs so the 5pm session will be postponed. :-(
Hollowing out the future of work..virtual and transnational
bbc.co.uk
This is a strikingly business as usual projection of the future (singular) of work. The neo-liberalization of the marketplace is made normal, with attendant loss of jobs, careers, security, all part of the 'march of progress' in a globalizing 'flat' world.
What is left out are people's associations with locale and culture - people are assumed to be atomized parts - unplugged from one place and plugged into another. This is true for only a minority of the world population, those people willing to rupture social ties, who do not have children (and can move quickly) and can afford the increasingly expensive jet fuel.
Behind the facade of inevitability are the social interests that are the winners in this particular image of the future.
I wonder whether some of these roles, like investment bankers, will continue to be valued to highly especially if there is another significant derivatives driven downturn. I'm almost tempted to look at differences based on industry (current and potential) segments.....
Hi,
I'm closing this conversation. Thanks to all who participated!
Thanks for your feedback! Team Branch
