The Future of Work: Video Games in the Conference Room, Philosophy Lectures in the Machine Shop and Gourmet Meals in Underground Mines

For more than 100 years, economists, philosophers and scientists at all ends of the political spectrum have predicted a future where much of the work that has been historically been performed by humans will be taken on by machines and computers. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes imagined that his grandchildren would live in a world where the humans would struggle to find meaningful work to fill their time and the length of the work week would fall to 15 hours [i]. In 1950, mathematician Norbert Wiener, argued that machines would soon free society of ‘relentless and monotonous drudgery,’ allowing humans to spend our time on engaged in creative knowledge work [ii]. In 1971 anarchist Murray Bookchin suggested that industrialized countries were rapidly approaching a “materially abundant, almost workless era in which most of the means of life can be provided by machines,” in his proposal for a post-scarcity anarchism [iii].

More recently, in his 2015 book, “Rise of the Robots, Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future,” Martin Ford acknowledges that the previous warnings of mass technological unemployment but argues that the current wave of technological improvement is different because, the exponential growth potential of…