The Future of Work: Are We There Yet?

New tech is changing where, how, and even why we work

If only they made crystal balls that could see into the future of work 🔮🧙‍♀️ There’s been some big changes to the working world, from the rise of remote employment to the rapid implementation of AI technologies, and an epidemic of people forgetting to mute themselves during zoom meetings (with the added bonus of an onslaught of very funny tik toks of said incidents.) As humans, we’re always scrambling to predict the future, whether we’re scouring the internet to see if it’s going to rain during our highly anticipated outdoor birthday brunch in three weeks or hyper-analyzing the latest episode of House of the Dragon — and since people spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime it’s not a surprise that “The future of work” has skyrocketed as a hot topic since 2012. But before you break out your future of work tarot cards, we did a little research of our own to see what’s on the horizon when it comes to the way we work, and in our opinion, the future is certainly bright ☀️

[Corny movie voice] But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s — uh, rewind a bit 📼Gartner defines the phrase “future of work” as “changes in how work will get done over the next decade, influenced by technological, generational and social shifts.” “Technology” is often the operative change agent in our imagination of the future of work, with social shifts following from technological innovation (like when social media changed the way we make plans and build relationships). It’s evident that technology has impacted the way we commute, communicate, meet, read, report, interact with data, understand the past or predict the future, and so on. For those of us in the traditionally categorized white collar office roles (including those of you working from home and wearing a dress shirt and pajama shorts right now,) it might be tempting to define technology as the digital tools that you use everyday, but we’re not talking about your meticulously detailed color coded google calendar. It’s helpful to think of technology more broadly — wheel, hammer, natural language processing, Python, machine learning, traffic light, clay kiln. If we consider how broad the phrase “future of work” is, thinking about it in terms of “the latest update to Excel equations” is too narrow and shortsighted.

If we look at moments of significant development in the history of technology, we see huge shifts in how people labor, how they use their bodies and minds, how they’re reimbursed, and the structure of social and class systems and it truly is astounding to see how far we’ve come. Think back to high school, when your American History teacher taught about how Ford mechanized the factory and we saw broadly skilled artisans shift into hyper-focused aspects of “the machine.” Charlie Chaplin famously dramatizes man becoming a cog in his tongue-in-cheek Modern Times, in which he, a human worker, feels alienated, clumsy, and outpaced by his new mechanical counterparts. The monetary fruits of increased productivity famously fell into the pockets of owners more than laborers, until unions fought to create a middle class. Increased efficiency brings about increased leisure time, as long as the profits of productivity are equitably possessed. As long as the worker making the car can afford to own the car, the system remains sustainable.

Modern Times, 1936

We’ve come a long way from having our minds blown by the assembly line 🤯 Instead, the new driver of change is artificial intelligence, so much so that we live in a world in which we need the level of automation that AI technologies provide. There are examples everywhere, of course. Take climate change — how even watering your garden becomes something that AI can deliver, “better”: sensors interpret the state of crops and trigger the distribution of appropriately timed water and fertilizers, making food production possible at a scale appropriate for a world of 8 billion people with increasingly unpredictable climates. Furthermore, in the internet age we generate and collect amounts of data we never dreamed would exist. The volume of this data is so huge, we can’t interpret it without automation. It’s like trying to understand thousands of google reviews on the Spotify app — not possible until AI makes it possible 👀

Ford’s Model K came out 115 years ago in 1907 and inspired a modern way of working — which is what makes our current quest to understand the future of work so damn exciting. There are a plethora of questions that arise as we enter a potentially exciting, potentially excruciating unknown, but there’s no need to waste 20 dollars on your local fortune teller. Let us be the Doc to your Marty McFly in our new limited blog series, where we’ll take a peek into trends we expect to see from the future of work 🚗🚀 Until then, keep learning, working, and innovating because at the end of the day the future of work is shaped by people, and more specifically, you.