Employment & Value Creation in 2035
Why almost no-one has a job anymore
A postcard from Gracey about jobs, purpose and creativity
July 20, 2035
There are four differences between how we think about work, productivity and creativity in our world:
- In your world your income is linked to your employment; in our world our income is linked to how well we balance regeneration and consumption.
- In your world you are rewarded for highly specialised skills and for hard work; in our world we understand that people perform best at activities they enjoy intrinsically and for which they receive no reward.
- In your world there is an overall societal belief that income and resources are scarce; in our world everyone experiences abundance.
- In your world, businesses strive for growth; in our world all productive activities strive for regeneration.
Types of Jobs
Ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, all jobs have been divided into four types:
- Routine Manual: includes construction, transportation, production and repair occupations — factory workers.
- Routine Mind: includes sales and office occupations where work is the same every day, but some mental activity is required.
- Non-routine Manual: includes service occupations related to assisting or caring for others — hospital staff, elderly carers, teachers.
- Non-routine Mind: includes management and professional occupations like accountants, doctors and lawyers where intellectual skill is valued.
Job Automation
All four types of jobs experienced growth in almost every country on earth until the early 1990’s, when automation started reducing routine work. Factory workers were largely replaced by robotic arms. More and more machines were invented to remove humans from routine manual labour. By 2020 almost all routine jobs were done by machines. There were almost no driver positions available anywhere on the planet and construction and production jobs had mostly disappeared.
These machines were — initially — unintelligent, but rapid advances allowed machines to start learning for themselves. A supercomputer beat the world’s best chess player in 1997; another taught itself how to play chess in 72 hours in 2015; and in 2016 another supercomputer beat one of the best living Go players — 10 years before anyone thought it would be possible. By 2025 almost all non-routine jobs — manual and mind — were mostly done by machines, with humans playing only a small role. Healthcare, finance, journalism, customer service, accounting and legal professions are just some examples of industries almost entirely run by intelligent machines.
Slavery
While jobs were being automated away, many workers started realising that slavery was still alive and well in 2017. They realised that the physical chains abolished by the early 1900’s had been replaced by digital and procedural chains. The most widely recognised ‘chain’ was an Income Tax Number and the ritual of submitting tax returns annually.
Workers started realising that they were enslaved in the game of capitalism. They started questioning whether the constant growth demanded by capitalism made sense on a planet with finite resources. They could see that capitalism thrived under a model of extraction, where a small group of people extracted resources from the planet and extracted time from their slaves. Teachers started realising that their education systems weren’t teaching life skills, they were teaching conformity to a system of enslavement. As a result, many initiatives started popping up all over the world exploring alternative economic models to capitalism.
Purposeful Work
Today, in 2035, we no longer have employers like you do. There are plenty of productive businesses where people work voluntarily because they are inspired by the company’s vision, not driven by desperation for an income. No-one has a job that they commute to, and no-one feels trapped doing something just for the money.
In a future postcard I’ll explain how we pay our bills, because we’re not paid by employers. We discovered a system of reward that works far better than a salary. But before I tell you about our income, we made another important discovery while we were looking for alternative models of employment. We discovered that when people were rewarded for work that you place little value on in your world, all of society benefited. Our system of reward pays CEO’s the same as artists, musicians, teachers, nurses, volunteer workers and street workers who regenerate our living spaces. In your world you reward individual players by how well the play the capitalist game, but in our world we reward individuals by how well they regenerate their immediate environment.
Summary
All economic activity today is driven by the rules of an economic system that no longer supports humanity and is nearing its demise. The new way of rewarding purposeful activity is to take regeneration into account.
Questions to Explore
- What is job polarization? Ask Google
- How will additive manufacturing affect employment? Ask Google
- How will autonomous vehicles impact jobs? Ask Google
- How will DeepMind affect the future of work? Ask Google
- Can brains, minds and machines work together? Ask Google
- What is the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence? Ask Google
- How will Artificial Intelligence affect the environment? Ask Google
- Who are Eric Horvitz, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and Allen Newell? Ask Google
- What four global forces are breaking trends? Ask Google
- Is capitalism nearing an end? Ask Google
- What is the difference between a capitalist economy and a purpose economy? Ask Google
- What is regenerative economics? Ask Google
Postcards from 2035 is a series of profoundly simple interlinking ideas describing life in a highly desirable society, where everything and everyone is advanced, happy, intelligent and problem-free. It’s a blueprint of the world we need to create. The best thing you can do to help us get there is to share with your friends and get the conversation started with the questions this postcard has raised.
