The Future of Work — A Hypothesis

If you have been employed in the US and over the age of 16 during this past decade, you have had the good fortune to see an explosion of productivity in the United States. Sounds awesome doesn’t it? Despite the “Great Recession” and the decline of PC Sales, the rise of the iPhone and then the iPad and then countless flavors of knock-off contrary to Samsung’s contentions in court — there has been an incredible rise in productivity. Does this mean that there has been an equivalent rise in jobs? Worthy question. I’m not sure that I could say that I see jobs exploding across the country and it’s not because we off-shore everything or outsource everything or whatever else we would like to point at as being a source for heartrending concern. I’d like to point toward the future here and ask everyone to consider what it might look like — perhaps that will offer us a view on what is happening today — at least according to one hypothesis…

The year is 2030…

You woke up this morning to the sound of twittering in the air. You look up from your bed and you see an amazing view through the window: Africa! The sun shines warmly upon you and you feel completely relaxed. Your Soomba rolls up with a fresh cup of coffee — you always wonder how it never spills a drop — something about “gyroscopic balance” that the Sellbot told you about when you went into the house of the future showroom. Pretty amazing really — the Sellbot knew everything there was to know about Soombas and gave you the ratings of every single one available from anywhere in the world — including those brand new cool Chilean ‘bots that could follow you on a hike — you remember the Sellbot calling them Sherpos — sort of like Sherpa but not.

You look up for a second before you figure out whether you have to jump or just roll out of bed. Noting where you happen to be looking at that moment, your schedule pops onto the ceiling in softly glowing letters and you can see that your first appointment isn’t for a couple hours. With a spoken word “Where”, the schedule changes on the ceiling to show you a map of your appointment on the left and a route map on the right as well as an estimate of how much time it will take you to get there. With some time to kill, you decide to play a little with your newest project — designing a lake house. It’s a little different from lake houses in the year 2010 when you were a kid. First of all — it’s being integrated into the lake. This house doesn’t sit on the shore — it doesn’t need to. Not all lakes are zoned for residential development of course, but for the most part, building doesn’t work the way it used to. The goal of all architecture today is to integrate into nature — freeing up the wild to be wild and opening up natural migratory paths for all animals. The North American wilderness preserve is no longer a place you go to, it’s under your feet every day and all around you.

Holding your hand up above you, your lake house appears in the air. You don’t have to move much but as soon as you start to reach for your design — the bed shifts to accommodate you for proper ergonomic support. Some smart girl back a few years ago realized that the bedroom just had to change. She watched her boyfriend work in bed and no matter how many times she told him it wasn’t good for him and she realized that since people were going to keep doing more in bed than just sleep — there was good business in making beds that offered more than just a flat surface. The bed wraps you comfortably as it shifts into a better position for you to look at your design. The Soomba modifies it’s stance to give you better access to your coffee despite the changes in the bed.

“Cool” — they figured out how to get the lake currents to integrate into the power system of your lake house. As the “ideaist” designer of the lake house, your job is to imagine what could be. Everyone comes together around great ideas and agreements are made virtually about who will do what. As the idea guy — you’re working on designs for about a hundred different dwellings fitted to natural surroundings across the globe this year. You work with about 20 principal property developers but you have minor roles at another 60 custom developers around the globe. Work has changed a lot since you got out of college — and that was only 2 years ago. You’re 19 years old and you’ve been dreaming this stuff up since you were a kid. People started paying for some of it before you even hit high school. Your parents didn’t let you become a working stiff just yet — but it was pretty cool to have a couple of your designs written up and on the telewalls at the gym when you were training for your soccer team.

Somehow your parents managed to get you sucked into some really cool board games and video games pretty early on. These games didn’t just spend a lot of time playing for points and levels but actually concentrated on teaching you business etiquette — and a few other useful things that didn’t seem important at the time. They put you into a progressive school that concentrated on helping you to explore whatever your interests were. Much of the learning model was based on having a “guide” who acted as a mentor while you played different learning games physically, on table tops, and in virtual environments — all the while engaging and giving you access to whatever you wanted to learn. As guides, your teachers were always learning in some ways alongside you, but at the same time were in a great position to help you to understand the nuances of what each game offered for your experience. In retrospect, it was pretty damn crafty. Who knew you could learn so much from just “playing games” all day?

Alright, time to jump in the shower . . . well, that’s what it looks like from the outside anyway. This shower is a little different from what people might have thought of a decade or so ago. Each time you jump into the shower, it’s part work-out, part health assessment, part good citizenship, etc. Your shower involves an amazing array of sensors detecting visual changes, temperature changes, breathing changes, etc. Moreover — your shower also involves a treadmill, a pair of shorts to be thrown off halfway through, a stationary cycle, a telewall showing you your trainer’s latest recorded personal workout to get your day started and just enough dangling fitness bands and other objects to make it look a little like a torture chamber. Really, though — what people realized is that if they could just combine space a little more efficiently, you could do a pretty amazing amount of working out in a pretty shockingly small amount of room. Gyms are now places where you meet your coaches and trainers rather than places where you are surrounded by stacks and stacks of weights. Back to the shower: by tracking every aspect of your metabolic response, body mechanics and behavior, your shower is now more a key piece of your personal health management approach. Best of all — not to waste an opportunity to convert some potential energy into something useful — every aspect of your workout is also contributing to reducing your power bill. Nothing like instant rewards just for being healthy! Ok, admittedly it was a little weird the first time you got sprayed in the face while running on the treadmill . . .but you get used to it. After a half hour of a high intensity workout you can feel your blood pumping and you’ve earned that delicious smell wafting through your condo. Speaking of which…

Your KChef must be kicking into high gear this morning. You can always tell that you did a good wake-up workout by the number of things that are happening in the kitchen. Coming around the corner in your towel, dehumidifying blowers peel off the excess water as you walk through the hall — you see the island hard at work. Your KChef has 3 different pans busy on the glass: fresh spinach, some tasty bacon, and some fresh coffee to follow-up the cup you’ve been nursing since you awoke. Fantastic! Best of all — a set of gold glowing letters are fading in and out on the wall as you walk in. “Congrats! PR for Burpees!” No wonder there were 3 slices of bacon crisping away on the glass. Pulling a chair over to the countertop, it rises up to meet you as you start to sit. Made with some of the same tech that went into the Soomba — gyroscopically balanced, your chair adjusts to your settings and keeps your posture in alignment while making you feel just slightly off-balance. While not strictly a part of your workout, the balancing-act for breakfast helps to keep your coordination up to snatch — which won’t hurt on the soccer field later this evening.

Looking back on Today…

The kitchen might be a little hard for us to recognize today. There are a few major things missing from the room — first and foremost: the refrigerator. After countless years of wasted, spoiled food in the United States, someone had a sensible solution: provide just-in-time food supply. Pairing it with hyper-local, perfectly-managed, refrigerated depots close enough to deliver food supplies in 5 minutes made the concept a revolutionary success. The automated refrigeration centers did a fantastic job of keeping track of spoilage, maintaining food effectively, and efficiently managing the electricity involved in refrigeration. Depots were high security places in an interesting turn-about. In fact, all food management was considered a high-security concern; not just to protect people from food terrorism but, more importantly, to stop waste. Food became a worldwide “basic human right,” according to the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. Thanks to amazing advances in robotics and sensor arrays, farming was facilitated, along with: logistics, storage, refrigeration, handling, processing and more. These advances didn’t prevent people from farming — they simply ensured that everyone had access to quality food that was safe and free from spoilage, with as little waste as possible. Vertical farming helped a lot with this. By providing more of a just-in-time food growing capability, gaps in weather, growing season, and crop productivity could be handled, reducing some of the peaks and valleys.

Back to 2030…

You wonder — as you knock out the rest of breakfast — what automation might do next. It changed the way jobs worked — that became clear about ten years before. Robots became commonplace. Automation became a part of every day life. Computers and tablets and all those other things of the 2010s seemed so amazing at the time. Now the clothes you wear, the jewelry you buy, the rooms you live and work and play in, everything is a part of the “internet of things” that people used to talk about. Jobs now look a lot different than they used to. For a while there was a lot of complaint from people not excited about the changes. You became either a “techer,” an operator, a “guide,” a manager, a leader, a creator/maker or an ideaist. Pretty much every job fell into one of these categories:

• a techer is a person who manages robot teams, computer programs, data centers or whatever
• an operator is a person who monitors, tracks and troubleshoots robot teams, computer programs, data centers or whatever
• a guide is a person who did what you’d expect — guiding people or computer AIs on what needed to be done
• a manager — no questions there — manages people so that everyone is held accountable and has the resources for whatever it was they were supposed to do
• a leader — there are lots of different kinds — but in general, a leader sets the path and takes responsibility for whether or not the path achieves the vision that is set out by some combination of creators/makers and/or ideaists
• a creator/maker — this person or AI took an idea and figured out how to turn that idea into practical reality — creator/makers were kind of like walking encyclopedias and problems solves all wrapped up in one
• an ideaist — ideaists are the people with endless and prolific imaginations who try to figure out “what could be”; obviously people had more or less capability in all of these areas — it isn’t uncommon for someone to be a leader in one situation, an ideaist in another and a guide in a third.

Jobs are now something that you do to achieve a specific goal and, depending on the value created by achieving that goal, you get paid more or less. You get to bid on the jobs and, based on your past accomplishments, you may be a part of any team. It’s as if life has become, in some ways, one big game.

The Year is Now

So the hypothesis is that jobs are going away and not coming back. Why? Because repetitive jobs that require physical labor are being automated with robots, repetitive jobs that require mental labor are being automated with computers, and games are replacing much of the fact-based teaching jobs. To be prepared for the future, it is becoming important to figure out:

1. what kind of creator/maker work we all might like doing
2. what kind of topics we might be ideaists for
3. whether or not we want to manage people or artificial intelligences
4. whether or not we might want to operate, monitor & repair or manage robotic or computer- driven production capabilities
5. when we may want to lead
6. when we may want to guide

The rules of the road for this future will be: to always continue learning, explore our interests, share ideas, promote the ideas of others, and be flexible to take on different roles at different times. As technology marches forward, the jobs of the past aren’t coming back — we should be preparing for the jobs that will be. There will be more jobs — but they will be different.

What will you be in the next 15 years? An Ideaist? A Creator? A Leader? A Manager? A Techer? A Guide? An Operator?