Future of Work: Essential Resources

5 min readDec 12, 2017

The Future of Work is increasingly prevalent in peoples’ minds as technology becomes more capable, adaptable and overtly manifest in retail, finance, transportation, law, healthcare, government — touching our day-to-day lives and those of our neighbors and family. I speak on this topic now and again, which has lead to devoting significant focus to surveying and digesting articles and books of thought-leaders. To simplify sharing such recommendations, I will collect into this page my recommendations for on-ramps to engaging in the dialogue on the Future of Work.

Automation Technology

My “go-to” orientation on the threat to jobs by technology is the 15-minute CGP Gray video: “Humans Need Not Apply”:

Automation Technology, Corporate Competitiveness & Workforce

At the forefront of the dialogue on technological automation impact to jobs are the luminaries of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE):
Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee and David Autor.

The 2013 MIT Tech Review article “How Technology is Destroying Jobs” pulled from the first of three books by Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson. These are clearly a literary starting place: (2011) Race Against the Machine, (2014) The Second Machine Age and (2016) Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. The essential David Autor is (2015) Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.

Countering some of the more alarmist concerns on jobs, James Bessen (Boston University) has a number of articles — for me the essential being: “Will Robots Steal Our Jobs? The Humble Loom Suggests Not”.

Macro- Socio-Economics, Politics & Cultural Factors

In 2016, Ryan Avent, a columnist for The Economist, published The Wealth of Humans, which comprehensively addresses topics ranging from conceptual notions such as The Meaning of Work and Social Capital to some of the theory underlying economic concepts of Labor Abundance, Wealth Distribution, Rent-seeking and the Nature of the Firm.

The Economist also published “The Onrushing Wave” in 2014, which first widely-communicated the Oxford study on likelihood of automation across a variety of occupations. “A World Without Work” (2015) may also be of interest, a deep examination as is expected from The Atlantic.

In 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) took on The Future of Work as a topic and collected a lot of data and wrote a number of reports that provide excellent material to reference (if not read). Other efforts include the National Science Fdn’s Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, Australia’s 3A Institute, Virgin Unite/BTeam Future of Work: New Ways of Working, and the New America / Bloomberg Shift Commission on Work, Workers and Technology.

The more local one’s focus, the more pragmatic and less driven by political ideology — all mayors and county governments deal with clean water, trash removal, housing, road and bridge repair, etc. Similarly, the impact of worker displacement compels attention to job availability vs. unemployment and Republican or Democrat — the impact to the community must be addressed. Mayor Pete made this video framing the concern (heavily usurping the messaging from Andrew Yang, who single-handedly brought the topic into the dialogues and public debate for the 2020 presidential campaign) — see his ongoing work in “Humanity Forward.”

I would say Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari merits inclusion though it also goes well beyond the Future of Work topic. The book is a comprehensive consideration for a myriad of emerging interactions between humans and technology. But it nicely frames the importance of technology in the evolution of human society and civilization, and includes specific discussions on the pervasive reach of algorithms into human lives.

Continual Learning, STEAM & “The Gig Economy”

Absolutely the most essential orientation into this is the seminal “Jobs Are Over: The Future is Income Generation” (in particular Part 2) by Heather McGowan (heathermcgowan). She has since evolved the narrative in articles such as “Preparing Students to Lose Their Jobs”. Addressing the most valuable (trainable) skills, watch Vivienne Ming’s “The Skills Most Predictive of Positive Life Outcomes Are Also Most Robot-Proof”.

Artificial Intelligence & Internet-Accessible Knowledge

This video from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) seeks to provide a framework and grounding in capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.

In consideration of the unprecedented transfer of human knowledge into a freely-accessible repository (even via mobile devices), the Scientific American story “The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories” explores the behavioral and neurophysiological impact of the likes of Google, YouTube and Wikipedia on our minds/brains.

(Update, October-2019) This past July, Jonathan Zittrain published an article that bears profound consideration on this landscape: “Intellectual Debt: With Great Power Comes Great Ignorance.” We are experiencing a wave of success in applying automated learning to solve practical problems and tame vast and complex data, while incurring debt in the form of moving ahead without fully understanding these results. This gap in understanding — to assert bounds of applicability, to adapt to new situations, to know how to further improve — represents a future need for human minds to reconcile (pay the debt of ignorence) and emergent opportunity for human professions.

Shameless Self-Promotion

The Future of Work topic has been of great interest to me over several years and from the above references (and many other sources) I have attempted to synthesize a stories and threads of discussion into articles posted here under the pretentious title “Existential Questions on The Future of Work” including these themes:

Part 1: People & Civilization
Part 2: Institutions & Economics
Part 3: Technology & Automation
Part 4: Makers & Takers
Part 5: Values & Questions