Everyone is talking about the future of work

When my local barber told me 'next time you get your hair cut you could be swiping your debit card on a machine, which will proceed to cut your hair with the option of holiday conversations or silent snipping.' I think “yes, I can see this happening”. 

This week we worked with our academic colleagues at the CIPD’s Scottish centres: Edinburgh Napier University Business School’s Dr Kirsteen Grant, her colleague Dr. Valerie Egdell, Strathclyde’s Dr. Kendra Brikken and our Head of Policy and Insights (that’s me) to think about the future of work. The event held at Glasgow’s Lighthouse design museum and was also uniquely facilitated by a graphic designer who drew what we said and captured our thoughts in various stations.

Valerie explained that 75% of the growth in Scotland’s population will be of the post 85 age group and a diminishing number of young people will be born. More of us will have to work longer. Whether we need more immigrants or hope that the decline in life expectancy will persist till we all die at 69 again, none of this will be tackled without contemplating the future of work and skills. If you want to join us with colleagues from Edinburgh International Business School, Age Scotland and Business in the community later in September you can find out how to here. 

Kendra talked about how historic the whole future of work debate is. She took me back to my days in Glasgow University rapt listening to economic history lectures, explaining the various shifts in production. Mechanisation of cotton production, and electricity replacing steam power for example, and the move towards automation in the 1960s. She also talked about power and inequality, big issues which will shape the future of work.

I shared some perspectives on the future of work. Some take a dystopian view that work will not exist with AI and that human will become mere appendages to machines. Work will be colonised by a small species of superhuman, who will earn so much they will all live on individual planets to avoid tax. 

Others visualize a world where free of the drudgery of project management and audits, monthly report to the board, or driving buses through Edinburgh, we will be truly free. In this utopian work world we can all retire to a hyper-actualized existence supported by a decent minimum income. Without dull paid work for corporations, we can pursue our chosen vocation as a crafter. Maybe brewing our own beer from the tears of losing football fans, or running a Yoga-knitting circle. 

Work won’t disappear but it will change. Robots have been doing “our work” since the 1960’s as Kendra reminded us wryly. I mentioned the famous Fiat Strada advert of the 1970’s to the Figaro chorus of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Those who bought the car may have felt the machines were spraying rust. Robots and automation have of course become weaponised with the growth of AI and machine learning. Every day there is another story of an AI system doing something incredibly complex which takes human’s hours in the blink of an eye. Who knows they may even get to one day understand a self-assembly furniture instruction or Scotrail’s weekend timetable. Rather than jobs being destroyed they will be disrupted and fragmented. We will need new skills at all levels.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are choices around the Future of Work it isn’t some process that will just happen. We can shape it and in part two of this blog I will capture what our HR professionals thought and how they think we can make work more human.