Can a world without work provide an opportunity for humanity to redefine success on its own terms? We may find out sooner than expected.

There is an increasing hysteria about AI, especially of the generative type, and its impact on jobs and the workplace, with some people advocating for a stop in AI research and many others saying that AI will end up taking all our jobs.

This prophecy is usually done with an air of doom and negativity, as though not having to work would be the worst thing that may happen to us. But would it?

I don’t think AI is going to take all our jobs any time soon. It may take some and enhance many others, but we are still far away from a total human job substitution by machines. 

Still, with the world of technology, you never know, things can change very rapidly, so it is worthwhile reflecting on what a world without work would look like. 

The meaning of life or lack thereof

I have written about the meaning of life in different posts, but this one gathers most of my thoughts. 

I believe there is not one meaning of life. We all give meaning to our lives differently, and the big secret is that each of us must find what gives meaning to our life.

For that, self-awareness and self-knowledge are essential, as we cannot pursue a life that makes us happy if we don’t really know who we are.

Many people in today’s society give meaning to their lives through their careers. They get fulfilment in what they do and find social status in the wealth and position they earn thanks to their occupation.

I won’t judge whether this is the right way to proceed or the desirable state of affairs, but this is the way it is. 

Human beings are social animals that play social games and require recognition from the group. We used to do this by being the best hunter or collector or being the shaman of the tribe. Now we do it by leading a company, being an engineer working on complex projects or creating new products and services for others to use.

We gain recognition, fulfilment and satisfaction in our careers, and we often find our life purpose in what we do. 

In a world where machines did all the work, what would happen with all this fulfilment, recognition and purpose? Where would we find them?

We don’t need work to be fulfilled, or do we?

In sociology circles, it is often cited a study from the 1930s on the effects of unemployment in society, the Marienthal study.

Marienthal was an Austrian town ravaged by unemployment after the 29 crash and the Depression that ensued. Some psychologists and sociologists studied almost 500 unemployed families living in that town.

The conclusions of the study were revealing:

“The unemployed experienced lower expectations and activity, a disrupted sense of time, and a steady decline into apathy. They tended to be lonely, isolated, hopeless and passive, yet prone to bursts of violence.”

There have been other studies about the psychological damage being unemployed can have on our minds, attitudes and outlook.

Marienthal and similar studies demonstrated unemployment’s negative and hurtful consequences, but they all did so in a context where some people worked, and others didn’t. It is not possible today to reproduce a society where nobody works to study the effects of unemployment on its citizens because we need people to be active for society to keep tacking along and for us to survive.

It is not the same, psychologically and mentally, to be unemployed in a society where the majority are working, and the social status is earned by the work one does than when not working is the norm and all are in the same situation.

The closest we have been to this kind of society is in societies where a big part of the population was enslaved and did most of the work, like in Ancient Greece and Rome. Back then, work was not a necessity for happiness and fulfilment. 

The “free” citizens of those societies got their fulfilment in philosophy, the arts, and politics, or the simple pursuit of pleasure and hedonism.

Enter self-actualisation and creativity

We didn’t evolve to need work to feel happy. 

What human beings need to be happy and feel fulfilled is self-actualisation. We need to express our creativity and feel we are learning and growing. 

During the last few centuries, we have relied on work to find the release for this need for self-actualisation, creativity and learning, but it wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t have to be like this.

Self-actualisation is about knowing yourself, accepting who you are, and trying to reach the full potential of who you can become. You don’t need formal employment for that.

You can reach your full potential by doing something creative, like writing, painting or playing an instrument, or by focusing on a hobby, learning new skills, helping people in need, or myriad other ways.

A world without work could usher in a new Renaissance where robots and AI did all the work and created a world of abundance, and human beings dedicated their time to self-growth and creativity. We could also spend this time socialising with people we love and like, playing with our children, doing exercise, travelling or doing any other pleasant activity.

Then again, it is entirely plausible that many of us wouldn’t know what to do with so much time, and we would spend it seeking easy pleasure.

Sex, drugs and virtual reality

Knowing the inclinations of the human species, some people would profit from this newfound freedom given by a world without work to work on their self-actualisation and find deep happiness. However, many others would feel like the subjects of the Marienthal study and would feel lost.

This latter group would be easy victims to the quick pleasures made available to them. Ever-more potent design drugs would keep people perpetually high, playing their preferred superhero or having sex with their favourite actress in a perfectly simulated virtual world.

In this world, many people wouldn’t physically leave their houses ever but would virtually travel to other worlds and live a fictitious second life. 

Inequality in a world without work

Inequality has been rising over the last few decades, but if you think we are living in an unequal world today, wait until we get to one with no work for human beings. 

As Thomas Piketty showed us in his best-selling work Capital in the 21st Century, when income from capital surpasses the total income from labour, inequality rises. In a world without work, people would stop working, but someone else would continue producing the goods and services required for us to live a comfortable life: robots and AI. 

These would be owned by companies, who would, in turn, be owned by shareholders. These shareholders would receive ever-growing returns, as they would be responsible for all the economic activity required for society to function. 

In a world without work, labour income would be zero or very close to it. The masses would be paid a Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a similar scheme, paid for by taxing the companies producing the goods.

These companies would be the only ones producing wealth, so they would pay an enormous tax bill, a tax bill sufficient to sustain the rest of society. Still, they would be left with a huge amount of money, and the wealth differences between the shareholders and not-shareholders would only grow with time.

Unless we reach something similar to the Fully Automated Luxury Communism promulgated by Aaron Bastani, inequality will only grow in this society. 

Historically, whenever inequality has grown disproportionately, it has led to riots and revolutions. Still, it is not clear that would be the case when a big part of society is happy and fulfilled pursuing their passions and self-growth, and the other part is sedated, playing games and having virtual sex.

Meaning in a world without work

We don’t need work to be happy, but that doesn’t mean that a world without work would be an easy utopia where everybody would be happy.

The transition to a world without work would be disruptive and difficult, and many people would suffer. Some people would find happiness and fulfilment and finally be able to focus on their true calling and do what they were supposed to do. They would become experts in tropical birds or the big expanses of the cosmos, paint or write, or help disadvantaged communities.

Many others, however, would rely on escapism into a virtual world and would live a life that wasn’t theirs in a world that isn’t even real.

A world without work would be a more unequal one, with the few dominating the many. A handful of people would have access to all the wealth and, thus, all the resources, weapons, and political and economic power.

Would the happy ones and the distracted ones do anything about it? Probably not, but who knows?

But before we get there, we need to have a world without work, and for all the advances in AI and robotics and all the doom-mongering around us, we are still far, very far from it. 

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Will AI Take Over Your Career? Not if you use AI to your advantage and develop the right competencies.

Many people are worried about their future career prospects in a world dominated by AI, but with the right mindset and focus, anybody can thrive in it. 

ChatGPT is in everybody’s mouths, but is the AI threat real? 

ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app ever, reaching 100 million users in its first two months. ChatGPT, Google Bard and other generative AI systems seem capable of doing more tasks that, only a few months ago, everybody thought were reserved for humans only.

Many people are worried about their jobs, and they should be.

AI will only get better from here, never worse, so people are right to be worried.

Will we end like horses at the beginning of the 20th century when they were displaced by cars and tractors? Or will AI and robots usher in a new golden era of productivity and job enhancement?

Technology will disrupt the job market like never before, but with the right mindset, skills and focus, it is possible to thrive in this new world dominated by machines. 

The AI Threat

Some people argue that technology has disrupted the job market before, but it has always ended up creating more and better jobs. 

Others say this time is different; this time for real.

Who is right?

Since the Luddites broke industrial machinery in the 18th and 19th centuries for fear of losing their jobs to them, people have worried about technology negatively impacting employment. This fear has generally been unfounded, as technology has eliminated low-value-added jobs and has created new, more added-value ones. 

The net result was always positive.

Artificial Intelligence is different, some people say. The key is in the word “intelligence”. If AI is really intelligent, it will do more and more jobs that are only suited to human beings in all industries until there are no more jobs left for humans to do.

It may take years or decades, but the end result will be the same: AI will do all the jobs, and there won’t be much else for us lousy human beings to do.

The AI threat is real.

Researchers don’t seem to agree on the data and on making predictions of the future, but some of the stats out there are sobering. For example, Zippia tells us that “AI could take the jobs of as many as one billion people globally and make 375 million jobs obsolete over the next decade”.

Surfing the AI wave

AI has improved a lot, especially in the last couple of years. 

Through automation, it has slowly but firmly encroached on many of the tasks that were the sole reserve of humans. 

But we are still far from the moment when AI will have the capability to take over most of the jobs currently done by human beings. When that happens, we may enter an age of abundance, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you asked me. 

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play”. 

It would be great to be able to play and dedicate your time to leisure and creativity. A world without work would have its own unique challenges and issues, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.

Before we get there, though, if ever, we need to navigate the disruptive environment AI is creating right now, in the present. 

We will have to surf the AI wave.

It will be a challenging wave to surf, but it is definitively surfable.

There are two ways to avoid the AI threat and navigate the disruption it will create in the job market: to make AI your friend and to develop skills AI cannot easily replace.

Make AI your friend

AI can be your friend if you know how to use it.

Everybody is talking about Chat GPT and how it can do many things the same way as human beings. The truth is, it is still a rather poor substitute for human skill in writing, but it can be helpful, nevertheless. 

Use ChatGPT or similar systems as an intern fully dedicated to you. They are not at the same skill level as you, but they can do some basic work for you.

For example, I use ChatGPT to help with my writing. I ask it to provide possible outlines for articles or propose different headlines, first lines or closing lines. I don’t let ChatGPT do the writing for me, but it’s an excellent way to get new ideas.

ChatGPT has enhanced my job as a writer without replacing me, and I hope it doesn’t do so any time soon.

The issue with this approach is that, as explained above, AI is improving every day, and we haven’t evolved much in the last hundred thousand years. We will reach a time when AI will be better than us in whatever we do. It may take one year, a decade, or a hundred years, I don’t know, but we will get there one day.

That’s why it is more sustainable to focus on the second solution.

Develop skills and competencies AI will not easily replace

There is something AI will have difficulty doing better than us, and that’s being human.

We are human; after all, they aren’t. We make silly mistakes, we forget things, and our emotions dominate us. We are also creative, caring, and purposeful.

To beat AI, you need to tap into your humanity and humanness. 

How do you do that? 

You need to focus on the following:

–      Emotional intelligence: understanding your and other people’s emotions, having empathy, self-awareness, etc. 

–      Creativity: AI can create beautiful things, but it lacks human creativity with real meaning. It doesn’t know why it does things. Its creations don’t have a higher meaning or purpose.

–      Purpose and meaning: only you can have a life purpose that goes beyond your personal self-interest, focused on helping others and finding meaning in life. Machines have a purpose, but this is utilitarian, not spiritual. 

Modern society is making us increasingly like alienated robots or machines, but the solution lies elsewhere. 

The solution to the AI threat is not to become more like a machine but to tap into our humanness and humanity. 

We need to be more human to beat the machines.

Overcoming the AI threat

Jules Verne said, “In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them”.

Verne was a prescient man. He predicted many things in his 19th-century science fiction books, like our trips to the moon or submarines. Let’s hope he is wrong this time and machines help us live better lives but don’t devour us.

For that, we need to use AI to our own advantage and develop competencies that machines cannot easily replace.

We need to be more human to beat the machines.

For that, we need to focus on our continuous personal growth and work on our emotional intelligence, creativity, and our purpose. Develop these qualities and find a job that requires any or all three of these to succeed. 

Do that, and you will be fine, at least for a few decades. 

After that, all the bets are off.

Read more: The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work

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The role of solopreneurs in the Future of Work – observations from a non-solopreneur

What role will solopreneurs play in shaping the Future of Work, and how will they disrupt traditional employment structures?

In The 6 Most Important Workplace Trends for 2030 and Beyond, I included New Working Models as one of the key trends, with solopreneurship having a special place within this category.

In the last few years, with the advent of the creator economy, the shock caused by the covid pandemic and the push for remote working enabled by technology, solopreneurship has been on the rise.

Traditional employment will not disappear, and other employment models will come to the fore, but solopreneurs will play an increasingly crucial role in the Future of Work.

What exactly is a solopreneur?

Solopreneur is a portmanteau formed by the words solo and entrepreneur. 

As the word indicates, solopreneurs form a solo business, composed of one person. They are the only founder and the only employee in their one-person business. They might and often do partner with contractors and freelancers but don’t have other employees on their payroll. 

Solopreneurs take all the risk of their business, make all the decisions, and do all the work (or most of it, if we subtract what they outsource to others).

New name, old concept?

Many argue that solopreneurship is a new name for an old concept: aren’t freelancers and contractors also one-person businesses?

They may have a point, but it depends on who you ask.

Some people make the distinction based on the size. Freelancers are contractors with a small customer base. Once they grow and scale this base, they’d become solopreneurs, as they would be seen as managing their own business.

I’m not sure I buy this distinction. A business is a business, regardless of its size, revenues or customer base.

Human beings like using new names for slightly different things, and now it is in vogue to call solopreneurs one-person businesses, but these businesses have always existed. 

A digital business

However, another distinction is often made: solopreneurs are usually associated with online businesses. 

A carpenter or a plumber could be, by the term’s definition, a solopreneur, but I haven’t seen this label applied to them. Graphic designers, content creators, and bloggers are more like it. 

The internet, mobile connections and a society that is always on have facilitated the creation of the one-person internet business, also known as the solopreneur. 

Solopreneurs and the Future of Work

Solopreneurship challenges the existing employment structures dating from the Industrial Revolution.

Together with the gig economy, the creator economy, the social media influencers’ business models and all the other new employment modes, it brings a new dimension to employment. In the Future of Work, there will be an increasingly varied and flexible array of employment models, and solopreneurship will be an essential part of it. 

Solopreneurship has advantages, like flexibility, autonomy, and control over work-life balance.

Also, it allows its practitioners to cultivate their self-actualisation and live happier and more fulfilling lives. It is possible to pursue self-actualisation as an employee in a corporation (millions of people have found self-realisation working for others). Still, it is arguably easier to find it when working on a personal project and setting your own goals. 

Solopreneurship is a newish phenomenon, and many predict it has yet to boom and explode. If true, it can potentially disrupt industries and create new job opportunities for many people.

That would be great, but beware, solopreneurs, not everything is as good as it looks. 

Beware, solopreneurs!

Not everything is as pink-coloured as it seems in the solopreneur world.

Solopreneurship can be very challenging. Undertaking a business entails assuming a risk, sometimes a big one, and like any business, it can fail miserably.

As the saying goes, a monthly salary is one of the biggest addictions of modern life. There is a reason for it: it gives us security. When you work for another company, you have a monthly income assured, regardless of what you do (at least until the company fires you, which is always possible).

A solopreneur will always have the uncertainty of whether they will make enough money to satisfy their needs. 

Also, the solopreneur’s life can be a lonely one. They often feel isolated, and they may lack the social interactions that other types of work can offer.

However, the most significant risk for a solopreneur is burnout, stress, and falling into the hustle culture trap. Many solopreneurs are extremely engaged with their project (which is great and to be expected), but this engagement may take a dangerous turn. They may want to be always connected, trying to squeeze the last ounce of productivity, and all their life may turn around their solopreneur business, forgetting all the other elements of a balanced life. 

Many solopreneurs are convinced hustlers. I left my thoughts on the hustling culture clear in the Manifesto Against Hustling Culture.

Be a solopreneur, by all means, it’s great, but beware of burnout, financial risks, isolation and toxic hustle culture. 

Towards a world of solopreneurs?

So, are we moving towards a world dominated by solopreneurs? 

The short answer is “No”.

A world where everyone forms a one-person business might sound like a utopia for many, but it wouldn’t be sustainable. Big corporations exist for a reason, and they have many advantages over one-person businesses. There are many industries like manufacturing, hospitality, health care, etc., for which it makes sense to integrate collective efforts and scale up into organisations formed by many people.

If everybody is at home building digital businesses, who will deliver all the basic and essential services we all need?

Having said all that, the solopreneur phenomenon will only grow over time. Increasingly more businesses are digital, and many of our needs are now satisfied online, with services that often can be better served by a solopreneur. 

An increasing part of the population sees the allure of being “your own boss”, so the number of solopreneurs will only go up.

Solopreneurs will be another integral part of the Future of Work. They will have a positive impact as they will challenge existing practices in many ossified sectors and industries, but not everything will be pink-coloured. Solopreneurship will bring new challenges.

Are you ready to be your own boss? 

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The time for a Manifesto Against Hustle Culture has arrived.

Preamble

We, the movement against hustle culture*, reject the notion that productivity, continuously being on, and self-promotion are the keys to success. 

We believe that the constant pressure to hustle leads to burnout, stress, and an unhealthy focus on material wealth. We reject the idea that our worth is tied to our output and refuse to participate in a culture that glorifies overworking and underpaying.

Article I: The Right to Rest

We demand the right to rest. 

Rest is not a luxury; it is necessary for our physical and mental health and well-being. We refuse to participate in a culture that treats rest as a weakness or a waste of time. We demand that employers and society at large recognise the importance of rest and allow us the time and space to recharge. 

We encourage the continuation of trials on reduced work time (e.g., four-day week) until we find the right formula benefitting both employers and employees.

Article II: The Value of Leisure

We reject the idea that leisure is a waste of time. Leisure is essential for creativity, innovation, and personal growth. 

We demand that society recognises the value of leisure and encourages us to pursue activities that bring us joy and fulfilment, not just financial gain. 

We demand the right to seek self-actualisation inside and outside work.

Article III: The Right to Prioritise Mental Health

We reject the idea that success is only possible through constant productivity. 

Mental health is just as important as physical health, and we demand the right to prioritise our mental health without fear of judgment or stigma. We refuse to participate in a culture that glorifies overworking and promotes the normalisation of burnout.

Article IV: The Right to Unproductive Activity

We demand the right to pursue leisure activities for their own sake and not because of their expected benefits in terms of gained productivity or career advancement.

There is no need to fill all the hours in the day with productive activity. It is possible and desirable to have empty hours of contemplation, nothingness, or boredom, as these are also essential parts of life.

We hereby state that it is possible and even desirable to read books for sheer fun and pleasure, and not only because they will teach us the latest productivity hack or how to advance in our careers. 

Article V: The Right to Wake Up after 5 am

We demand the right to wake up at the time of our choosing. We promulgate that it is not necessary to wake up before 5 am to be successful and conduct a happy and fulfilling life. 

Ice-cold showers, meditation, journaling and daily exercise before breakfast might benefit some, but they should be optional choices and not a compulsory recipe for success.

Article VI: The Right to Avoid Toxic Positivity

Hustle culture is conducive to toxic positivity, so we demand the right to avoid it. All emotions have their function, they all have their use, and people should be able to express them freely at work.

We reject the notion that people need to always be seen as positive and cheerful. They should be let be themselves and bring their authentic self to work.

Article VII: The Responsibility of Employers

We demand that employers take responsibility for creating healthy work environments that prioritise the well-being of their employees. This includes fair pay, reasonable working hours, opportunities for rest and leisure, and support for mental health. 

Article VIII: Quality over Quantity

We demand a more significant focus on quality than on quantity.

Quality is more important than quantity in most facets of life, including work. It is much better to do a little quality, focused, deep work than continuously multitasking, hustling, and trying to be seen always on without achieving much.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we reject the hustle culture and demand a society that values rest, leisure, mental health, waking up at any time, responsible employers and quality over quantity. We refuse to participate in a culture that glorifies overworking, burnout, and the devaluation of human life. We request that the focus on hustle culture be replaced by a focus on healthier work cultures, such as a break culture.

* This movement doesn’t really exist, but someone should create it. 

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The four-day week trials are multiplying, and the results are encouraging. Has the time for it finally arrived?

In 1930, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes published a now-famous essay titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, where he predicted that thanks to advances in automation and productivity, his descendants would only have to work 15 hours per week in 2030.

We are only a few years from that date, and much would have to change for Keynes to get this prediction right. 

After the progress made after the second world war in social and labour rights, not much has changed since then. In most developed countries, the contracted working hours have remained stubbornly around 40 hours per week for the last few decades, and full-time white-collar employees usually work five days a week, the oft-cited 9 to 5 Monday to Friday.

In the last couple of years, voices to reduce the working week to four days have been rising, and several trials have been carried out in some countries, like Spain, Finland, and, most recently, the UK.

The one just finished in the UK has been the most extensive study on the issue so far, and the results seem encouraging.

Has the moment for the four-day weeks finally arrived? Will we get closer to working the 15 weekly hours Keynes dreamed for his great-grandchildren?

Some numbers from the UK trial

The data coming from the UK trial paint a rosy picture:

– 92% of the participating organisations are continuing with the four-day week.

– Company revenue rose by 1.4% on average over the trial period.

– The number of staff leaving fell by 57%.

– 90% of employees said they wanted to continue on a four-day week.

– 15% said that no amount of money would make them accept a five-day schedule

– 39% were less stressed

– 71% of employees had reduced levels of burnout

– 43% felt an improvement in mental health

As The Economist tells us, “sceptics might observe that the companies involved are self-selecting. (…) Most of the participants that remain are smaller companies, many of them agencies specialising in management and technology. They also include charities.”

Still, the trial involved around 60 companies and 3,000 employees, so we shouldn’t lightly dismiss its conclusions. Further research should follow up, of course, but for the time being, the four-day week seems to be a net positive for both companies and employees.

Personally, it doesn’t surprise me, but why should it? I’ve been working four days a week for over a year and don’t think I’d ever go back to a five-day week.

My personal experience with the four-day week

In the summer of 2021, I decided to return to Spain from my assignment in Singapore. When talking about my new job and conditions, I asked my manager at the time if we could reduce my working hours only to work four days a week. 

She is an intelligent, empathetic and compassionate leader, and she knew I could do my job in four days and that that would keep me happy and engaged, so she said yes. 

This was not part of any corporate well-being program or four-day week trial. It was a personal request from my side.

It was my personal choice because I wanted to dedicate more time to writing and coaching, and I was at a moment where I could afford the pay cut. 

I was lucky.

Adjusting to a new rhythm

It took me some time to adjust. 

I had just arrived to settle in my small Basque hometown after 20 years of living in other places, so I had to find a house, and I wanted to spend more time with family and friends. 

On Fridays, my new day off, I was doing everything except writing and coaching, which was what I had planned to do. Still, having a day to do some errands before your weekend begins is nice.

After a few months like this, I finally found my rhythm for my Fridays off. 

I now wake up at the same time as my working days, and I sit down at my desk to write, think about new content, do some research, or have a coaching session. 

Friday is now my day. 

I spend most of it alone, as my girlfriend and friends are all working, but that’s perfect for me as I can dedicate it to my things without any distractions. 

Then I have my weekends for my social commitments and to rest. This extra day allows me to dedicate more time to my passions and hobbies. It frees up precious time that I otherwise wouldn’t have.

The extra day allows me to do things close to my heart. It is additional time I can use for self-actualisation and to fulfil my purpose.  

Efficiency and productivity

Has my work at Sodexo been resented because of it? No, not at all.

We must have it clear that a company doesn’t pay us a salary to attend meetings or work certain hours. They pay us to add value, to bring more value to the company than what we cost it.

This is a self-evident truth, but many people forget about it or never thought about it to start with. 

When you have this mindset clear, you can focus better on what needs to be done. You can prioritise and let go of all the superfluous things that aren’t required. And there are always plenty of them.

If you streamline your work, are strict with the meetings you attend, and focus on what is essential, you can gain productivity and efficiency and do more work in less time.

One of the keys is having fewer meetings and only focusing on the really necessary ones. Many of the companies in the UK trial reported having fewer meetings as one of the main positive outcomes of the trial. 

I can report the same for my own personal experiment with the four-day week. When you have less time to do things, you are more focused on what really matters.

When everybody works four-day weeks

My personal experience is a particular example of an employee working part-time in a company where full-time employment is the norm, at least for white-collar employees. The trial in the UK and other countries is different, as it promotes a four-day week for ALL employees in a company.

The trial has shown that employees prefer the four-day week but that the practice also benefitted the companies implementing it. A significant majority were planning to continue with it.

It seems to increase morale, engagement, and productivity and reduce absenteeism and turnover, so the benefits for companies are clear. 

Some companies tested staggered days off for their workforces; others let employees choose between Mondays and Fridays off, effectively lengthening their weekends. It all depends on the company and its activities and services, but there are different ways to allow an extra day off to employees without disrupting the service.

Are we at the gates of a shorter week and a longer weekend, like our forefathers were when they achieved the five-day and 40-hour week? It is still too early to say.

We have had only a few trials with a few thousand employees involved. There is no big wave of demonstrations asking for it, so it may not be imminent, but I think there is a shift in the air.

Towards more flexibility

The big labour revolution of our times is already happening, and it is around flexibility in the way we work. 

The main focus of this push for flexibility has been centred around the physical space and whether we work from the office, from home or from anywhere else. 

Remote and hybrid working are here to stay, but we will increasingly look at flexible work time arrangements. 

I am not sure that the four-day week will be institutionalised and available for everybody soon. We are still far from that, but people increasingly will be demanding, and getting, more flexible working arrangements, and the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 week will soon be a thing of the past. It will be replaced by an array of different working schedules, all complementary but none the same. 

We are still far from Keynes’s dream of 15-hour working weeks; we may never get there. However, we are a bit closer to getting a shorter week, and that’s a step in the right direction. 

These are baby steps, but with baby steps, you can get far, very far.

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This is the third article in the Possible Futures series, where we look at possible scenarios for the future. This time, we look at the Age of Abundance. 

Read the previous articles here: Possible Futures – A Day in your Life in 2040 and A Dystopian World – The Collapse of Society

It is the 7th of February 2049, and it’s your fortieth birthday today. 

Life expectancy where you live, in Milan, Italy, is 120 years, so you have possibly lived a quarter of your life already. It is a good moment to take stock of your life so far.

You have had to pass some difficult years, especially in your youth, but life is good now. Very good, actually.

We are now in what people call The Age of Abundance.

It wasn’t always like this

The 2020s and 2030s were convulsive, and that’s an understatement.

If this is The Age of Abundance, that was The Age of Scarcity.

We had several pandemics, starting with the one of covid-19 in 2020. Then we had covid-26 and the Great Flu Scare of 29. It felt like coming out of one and going straight into the next one.

The Russian-Ukranian War and the US-China Trade War merged into a global conflict with no clear winner but many losers. 

The war created an energy shortage and high inflation, or even hyperinflation, in many countries. The EU took backstage and became an irrelevant region in the world. 

On top of all this, Artificial Intelligence and robotics advanced so much that machines could carry out most jobs better and cheaper than humans. 

The laws of economic efficiency prevailed over all the rest, which meant most people lost their jobs just when governments started going bankrupt.

You remember it as a time of utter chaos and despair.

The dark times

It was in those promising times that you finished your degree in HR Management and entered the job market. 

The problem was that there were almost no jobs left for anybody, and there were none in HR. Companies carried out massive layoffs, so they needed HR to manage that, but when the process finished, there was no workforce to manage, no human resources left, as all remaining working resources were digital. 

You had a couple of crap jobs in your early twenties. They didn’t pay much, but at least it was something. 

Your parents lost their jobs at the beginning of the 2030s, and your precarious jobs taking care of the elderly and in retail dried out as even the jobs demanding human interaction and caring were taken over by machines.

You were all unemployed: your parents, your sister, and you. 

The government had no money to pay any decent unemployment allowance, so you went all homeless and poor, like more than half of the Italian society. The welfare state had been dismantled in a matter of years.

It was the same everywhere across Europe and what used to be called the “Developed World”. It was even worse in other countries.

Those were dark years, probably the darkest years in your life. Or so you hope, as you wouldn’t be able to survive anything like that again if it came. The continuous hunger, being forced to carry out petty crimes to make ends meet, the insecurity and violence in the streets, the haggard look of despair in your parents’ eyes…

Your father died in 2033, a broken man. Your little sister followed him in 2035, murdered in a gutter to steal from her the half-chicken she had stolen from someone else. 

Those were very dark times indeed.

The light at the end of the tunnel

In all that chaos, people didn’t stop protesting and going to demonstrations to ask for a solution to the government. 

Democracy was an empty husk, with the same politicians with the same fake smiles taking turns to win at the polls, attending more to the oligarchs who owned all the companies, with the robots and AI, than their citizens.

Surprisingly, the AI revolution that had wreaked havoc by making most of the population unemployed ended up being the solution we were all hoping for.

AI and robots were doing all the jobs humans did before, but both governments and corporations realised that people needed to have an income: governments because if not, the entire society would crumble; corporations because otherwise there would be no consumers for their products and services. 

Companies continued producing mostly everything without any human intervention, but they were heavily taxed by governments, and a Universal Basic Income was distributed to the entire population above 18. 

Companies produced and kept most of the wealth, so they were able to share some of it without impacting so much the earnings of their shareholders and owners. 

The second breakthrough arrived when nuclear fusion finally became a reality. Suddenly energy was cheap and plentiful. We were able to use the hydrogen in the atmosphere to produce the energy required to respond to our needs, with no carbon emissions.

Thus, we reduced carbon emissions to a negligible level and found different ways to sequester the carbon already in the atmosphere, so we averted the climate disaster already upon us. The world warmed a bit, but it was nothing catastrophic, and the temperature is now slowly going down.

The Age of Abundance

This is how we got to The Age of Abundance.

AI and robotics technology got cheaper and cheaper, so everybody started having a super-computer, a few housekeeping robots, and a 3D printer at home. Machines now produce everything, at home, in factories, in research and development… you name it, so everything is cheap and available to most people. 

Energy is basically free, food is synthetically produced and very cheap, so nobody is hungry anymore, and all other products are almost free… Today everybody has access to luxuries that only one or two generations ago people couldn’t imagine.

Still, exclusive luxury items continue to exist.

You can only have so many apartments overlooking Central Park or the Seine. Natural food cooked by the best chefs is only accessible to the few, and so are natural diamonds and other gems (gold’s value plummeted when we started mining meteors for it).

Society is divided in two: the uber-rich, that form the 1% of the population and own all the corporations producing all this, and the rest of the population, who are living a good life, but without some of the high-end luxuries of the uber-rich.

A World without Work

In 2049, there is no more talk of the Future of Work, leadership, management, or HR, because there is no more work. 

Work stopped being a thing about a decade ago. 

There have been some disruptions and adjustments during this journey, but overall, it has been a change for the better. People thought they would be missing work and the sense of purpose it brings, and this was the case for some people at the beginning, but most of them moved on and ended up finding a purpose elsewhere. 

Let us not forget that most people had been unemployed for a long time already. At least they weren’t poor anymore and had access to food, clothing, leisure, travelling, the Metaverse, and many more.

When nobody was working anymore, people dedicated their time to other things. Many found creative hobbies, and they immersed fully in them. 

The New Renaissance

AI can write, paint, or create music and film that objectively is much better than anything created by humans, but it has a small insurmountable problem: it wasn’t created by humans. People value and want things made by other people, even if they are quirkier and with some imperfections. 

That’s the whole point. Art is supposed to be imperfect and human.

Even if nobody wants to buy what you create, it doesn’t really matter because the point isn’t to make a living. Nobody needs to make a living anymore; we are all sorted. 

The point now is to create things for the sake of it, because we have the time and the willingness to do so. That’s enough.

We are living in a new type of renaissance, where billions of people are letting go of their creative juices and expressing themselves through different arts and creative endeavours. 

However, not everybody found their purpose in unleashing their creative impulses. Many people are a bit lost without the structure a work provides, and they are addicted to living in a lethargic world facilitated by design drugs and the virtual world of the Metaverse, where fake violence and virtual sex abound. 

It is not your thing, but you can understand how some people could fall for it. It’s alluring to escape reality and live a fictional life that might be more exciting than the real one.

The Age of Abundance or the Age of Inequality?

Some thinkers (yes, we still have some of those, as some people express their creativity by doing research and postulating theories in fields such as sociology, anthropology, or, wait for it, philosophy) believe that the Age of Abundance is a misnomer and that we can’t call it abundance when 1% of the population own 90% of the wealth.

It is arguably the most unequal society in history, but it is also the one with more widespread wealth and abundance. It is contradictory, but that’s the way it is. 

You often think about it and have concluded that these two things aren’t exclusive. The 1% of the uber-rich own most of the wealth in the world, but the remaining wealth is more or less equally distributed among the remaining 99%, and it is enough for all of them to live a more than decent life. 

Never in history did such a considerable proportion of the population have such high living standards.

The uber-rich live in their hyper-luxury bubbles, and nobody sees them, so most people are not bothered by their existence. They know they exist, but as their paths don’t cross, they don’t care. 

It is like a hybrid model of hyper-capitalism and communism: capitalism for the very top, communism enabled by technology for all the rest.

The 99% of the population is living a life that rich people at the beginning of the 21st century could only dream of, and the good thing is that this is widespread across all countries, races and social strata. 

We are all wealthy in a sense, but some people, just a few, are much richer.

Dark clouds over the horizon

You continue reflecting on this, and you realise that people seem content with the state of affairs, but you have a dark sense of foreboding growing inside you.

You don’t think this can last. Eventually, some people will want to have more. They will also want to aspire to reach the caste of the uber-rich, even if their lives are sorted today, and they will grow frustrated when they realise their paths to that goal are blocked.

You realise that the Age of Abundance may not be the ultimate solution to all our problems after all. 

You suspect that more disruptions and trouble may still lay ahead of us and that the long life you have in front of you will not be as uneventful and quiet as you wish. 

A tremor shakes you from head to toe. 

You have a family now, a happy family, and you don’t want your children to go through the hell you had to go to get here. You want them to have a quiet life, a life where they can enjoy the fruits of the Age of Abundance without having to go through major upheavals, like you had to.

Sadly, you don’t think you’ll get your wish. 

How do you feel about this future? What do you like, and what do you dislike about it?

These and other questions can help us decide what aspects of our life we want to keep and which ones we want to change to build a better future.

For more on the future state of the world, read The world in 2050 and What will the world be like in 2100?

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Research on longevity is progressing a lot, and living in a world where most people live to 150 years old is no longer a crazy idea. So what would such a world look like?

The latest research shows that some people alive today may live to be 150 years old or older. 

This would profoundly affect our work, leisure, relationships, and all other aspects of our life. 

What would such a world look like?

The quest for extended longevity

David Sinclair is an Australian biologist and academic, leading one of the world’s most advanced labs and research teams on longevity at Harvard. 

He is also known for writing a book on the topic: Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To, where he distils the latest on longevity research.

This post is not the place to go deep into the scientific intricacies of why stopping or even reversing ageing is scientifically possible within the next few decades. It suffices to say here that thanks to a better understanding of what produces ageing, we might be able to stop its effects by taking some medicines, conducting cellular reprogramming or with some genetic engineering.

As a consequence, we would live longer and healthier lives. We would increase both our lifespan and healthspan.

A world with extreme longevity

I want to highlight here an excerpt from Sinclair’s book:

“There is simply no economic model for a world in which people live forty years or more past the time of traditional retirement. We literally have no data whatsoever on the work patterns, retirement arrangements, spending habits, health care needs, savings, and investments of large groups of people who live, quite healthily, well into their 100s. (…)

Anyone who claims to know the answer to any of these questions is a charlatan. Anyone who says these questions aren’t important is a fool. We have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen.”

Of course, we don’t, but we can always speculate and guess, and that’s what we will do next, focusing on different areas, starting with work.

Work

Retirement and skillbbaticals

Recently there have been some demonstrations and strikes in France to protest against some measures from the government. Increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64 years was the main one. 

If we get to live 150 years and are in good health, both physically and mentally, until we are 140 years old, it would not make much sense to be retired for more than half of our lives.

I’m afraid our French friends would feel compelled to strike a few more times, but at the end of the day, the arithmetic of life doesn’t fail.

If people are healthy and can work, they should do so, but it’s also true that we need some rest now and then. Can you imagine working for more than 100 years without any breaks? 

Sinclair proposes the idea of “skillbbaticals”, “which might take the shape of a government-supported paid year-off for every ten worked”. 

It doesn’t have to be this exact formula, but people should be able to take a year off from time to time to travel, learn new skills, dedicate some time to a personal project, or charge their batteries.

All this is considering we have to work; maybe we don’t have to.

AI and robots may do all the work, and there won’t be any work left for humans, which might be a blessing or a curse, but that’s a topic for another day.

How many careers can you have in a working life spanning 100 years?

Nowadays, some people have “midlife crises” in their forties and change careers, or after a decade of doing something, they realise it wasn’t for them after all and change jobs. 

Or they just find a new purpose in their careers. 

Whatever the reason, people today can have 2 or 3 very different careers in their lives in a working life spanning 40 or 50 years at most. How many can you have when longevity is extended to double or triple that time?

Skillbbaticals can help here. 

In the future, people might be more open to change and to try different things for two reasons: they will have more time in front of them to try and err, and they might get tired of doing the same thing after a couple of decades.

Generations

As discussed in the post about demographic shifts, today we have four generations in the workplace, which creates some challenges. 

If we are still alive and working in 2100, how many generations will coexist and will this make the workplace even more complex? 

Some Gen X and Millennials may still be around, together with Gen Z, Gen Alpha and all the generations that will come afterwards. I guess by then we’ll have half the alphabet covered. 

It won’t be easy to keep track of all these generations for all the HR leaders and management gurus who like to write so much about them.

Leisure

Nowadays, there are some marked stages in life. People play and study when they are young, then they work for a few decades with only the weekends and vacations as time outside work, and they retire and get to enjoy some time without work the years or decades they have left in good health.

When longevity is extended considerably, age becomes just a number, and you look and feel more or less the same whether you are 40, 80 or 120 years old, things start to change.

Today, some people have gap years to travel the world before starting their careers. When you have 100 years in front of you, you may want to do that more often, especially if you can squeeze in some paid skillbbaticals every few years. 

In this new world envisaged by Sinclair and others, we will keep our health and looks throughout our lifespan. These would have profound implications on how we interact with others and our leisure activities. We would have relationships (friendship and romantic) across different age brackets, even many decades apart, as we won’t really know how old people are. 

Remember, age will be just a number.

Family

I don’t have children, but I often think about how amazing it must be to see your children grow into adults and have their own children. 

Now imagine that you get to know your great-grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren and that you are more or less as healthy and fit as them. 

Wouldn’t that be something extraordinary? You would form deep bonds with family members from many different generations.

Until death do us part

Marriages are supposed to be for life, although considering most Western societies’ high divorce rates, the reality is quite different. 

What would happen to the institution of marriage in a world of hyper-longevity?

For happy marriages, it would be amazing. What is not to love about sharing more time with your loved one?

There are many unhappy marriages, though; sadly, many remain unhappy for a long time. For the people living these nightmares, the vows of “until death do us part” were a sentence.

Perhaps knowing that they have still many decades of good health in front of them changes peoples’ perspective and they don’t get chained to a failed marriage for so long. Maybe it helps them make the decision sooner. Or maybe not.

The economy and consumption

Having people living healthily to their 150s would also affect the economy and consumption levels.

First, the economy. It depends on what age the centenaries retire, the levels of automation and a myriad of other factors, but it’s not clear how the current economies would create jobs for so many people when longevity is extended so much.

New services and industries would probably be created to cater to the new healthy elderly, but many other jobs would also disappear (see the healthcare section below, for example). 

If young people often need help to enter the job market in the current environment, how hard would it be for them when there are already 7 or 8 generations lodged in jobs?

People earn increasingly more as they advance in their careers. They also amass wealth as they buy houses and make other investments that compound their value over decades. Then this wealth is passed onto their children as they age and die.

This process starts to fail when the oldest generations don’t die and keep living for six or seven decades more. 

Would they keep amassing more and more wealth? Would we create a society with a new class division, that of the privileged elderly and the destitute young?

I don’t know enough to answer these and many other questions that come to my mind, but it is worthwhile pondering them. 

Consumption

Having people live longer and healthier would also impact consumption levels. 

Today, people don’t consume the same things when they are 30 as when they are 80, usually due to changes in health, fitness levels, and life priorities. 

When you have 120-year-olds who are as fit as young adults, their consumption levels might also become more similar.

The problem is that we cannot continue consuming the same when people die later and the population grows even more than today. 

We are already consuming too much, and our dear world suffers from it.

We need to reduce consumption, whether we live to 150 or not. Having longer lives and more people living longer is an even stronger reason to reduce our consumption levels today.

Healthcare

Contrary to what most people may think, extended longevity would impact healthcare positively.

Today most of the costs associated with healthcare go to cover care for the elderly and to treat diseases related to old age.

Ageing itself is a disease that fosters the creation of other diseases. The moment we can reduce our cells’ ageing and extend their life, many diseases will disappear, or their effects would be reduced considerably.

Hospitals and residences for the elderly would suddenly be empty as all these illnesses disappeared. 

Healthcare providers would be able to dedicate their depleted resources to researching and treating other illnesses. 

Illnesses and diseases wouldn’t disappear, but their incidence would be reduced considerably, freeing up valuable resources in healthcare to focus on the diseases still affecting the population.

A world without death?

If ageing is a technical problem that can be solved, can the same be said about death?

Maybe yes, maybe not, who knows. But, as wise people tend to say, be careful what you wish for, as it may become true.

An excellent book by José Saramago, titled Death with Interruptions, explores this exact topic. Death stops acting in a country, and from a specific date, nobody dies there. 

In the beginning, everybody is happy, but many problems arise. It isn’t pretty. 

Death teaches us many lessons and gives meaning to life. 

I am trying to decide what I think, I’m not sure yet, but I think I would rather die one day than live forever. 

Forever is a long time.

I wouldn’t mind living longer, to 150 years, for example, and meeting and being friends with my great-great-great grandchildren, but that’s about it. After a while, I think I’d be happy to die, get some rest, and leave the stage to others. 

150 years sounds like enough time to me now, although I probably will change my mind if I ever get there.

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These workplace trends will shape the Future of Work in the near future. Are you ready to make the most out of them?

We cannot predict the future with any accuracy, but we can try to understand the form it will take by studying the drivers and trends shaping it.

There are macro or megatrends shaping the world, such as technological disruption, climate change, demographic shifts or geopolitics, but there are also more specific ones at play.

Today we will focus on workplace trends. 

We will look at the six main trends moulding the world of work in this decade and beyond:

• AI and automation
• Flexible working: working from anywhere any time
• New working models: the gig economy and more
• In search of purpose
• Lifelong Learning
• Employee Well-being

AI and automation

In this blog, we have treated the subject of AI and automation extensively (for example, see Automation: the Endgame, Conscious Artificial Intelligence, My dear AI friend, or Love in the Age of Machines), and there is a reason for this.

Artificial Intelligence will be THE TREND this decade. 

It will have the most significant impact on the way we conduct our work. 

2021 and 2022 have brought us plenty of advances in the field, advances that have taken unawares even the most seasoned watchers of the space. We now have generative AI that can produce great-quality text and images, and the coming years promise to bring many more breakthroughs.

The question now is, will these breakthroughs benefit society as a whole, or will they do enormous harm?

Will AI enhance or eliminate your job?

It isn’t easy to give a conclusive answer to this question, but we’ll do our best.

If we look at the past, we can conclude that AI and robots will automate and displace plenty of jobs but will also create new ones. The net result would probably be net positive, as it has been in previous automation drives (for example, ATMs were supposed to displace bank tellers, but their job just changed, and their numbers actually grew as banks could afford to open more branches). If this were to repeat, AI would create new jobs and enhance current ones.

The problem is that history might not repeat itself; this time it might finally be different.

Why is that?

Because Artificial Intelligence, as its name says, is a new type of intelligence, and it will affect all sectors and all positions.

AI and robots will displace low-qualification jobs with repetitive tasks, which is already happening, but they will also replace high-skilled and creative jobs. This hasn’t happened yet, but it will probably start this year and accelerate throughout the rest of the decade. 

The thing is that AI will only get better; it won’t be as bad as it is today. This means that as it learns, improves and replicates itself, it will branch out to displace more and more jobs.

Will it displace all jobs, or will the best teams be made by humans and machines, like the centaurs in chess?

Time will tell, but we won’t have to wait much to find out. I suspect we’ll have a clearer idea in the next few years.

Read more: The AI Threat – How to Thrive in a World Dominated by Machines

Flexible working: working from anywhere any time

Flexible working is here to stay. 

It is not going anywhere, even if many bosses would want it to. 

We will be working more and more from anywhere and at any time. Hybrid working or entirely distributed or remote working arrangements are widespread and will only grow with time. 

Remote working has its advantages and disadvantages for both employees and organisations, but the truth is that many employees see it as a benefit or perk they have earned. When that happens, it is difficult to return and put the genie back in the bottle.  Some data shows that most people enjoy remote work at least some of the time and don’t want to go back to working full-time from an office. 

Some companies, like Apple, Tesla or Twitter recently, are trying to bring most employees back to the offices full-time. Still, they will reconsider their position and become hybrid or fully remote when they start losing their talent to other companies.

Managing remote or hybrid teams brings challenges and difficulties, so this will be a new skill the future leader will have to master.

New working models: the gig economy and more

Until the 2010s, the working models were more or less straightforward. No longer. 

Some people were entrepreneurs and founded companies, small, medium and big, while some others worked for these companies as employees, freelancers or consultants.

Now we have entirely new categories on how work can be organised, with some mixed models for people who aren’t employees but aren’t entrepreneurs either, and the arrival of the figure of the solopreneur.

The gig economy 

The creation of digital platforms that bring together consumers and service providers has given birth to the gig economy. 

As I predicted might happen by 2050, there will be two categories of gig employees in the future, with some megastar teachers, speakers, coaches, you name it, getting most of the market share in their areas, while others, like drivers, cleaners and other low-qualified workers will have to toil incessantly to make their ends meet. 

Some markets, like private transport services (Uber), are being regularised in many cities and states, but there are still many grey areas around the legal status of some of these gig workers. 

Still, this workplace trend will continue growing in the next few years, and more people will move from regular employment with a company to being part of the gig economy.

Content creators

The Internet and the tools now available to create a blog or a podcast, build a following and get paid online for advertising or selling services and products have enabled the creation of the content creator economy. 

People have created content for others to consume since Antiquity, especially after the creation of the print by Gutenberg a few centuries ago. Still, the process has intensified, and the entry barriers have tumbled in the last few years. 

Now there are almost 600 million blogs and 5 million podcasts in the world, with new ones coming to life every day.  Most of these are run by amateurs like me as a hobby, but many people are fully dedicated to them, with a few making a lot of money.

Gen Z and the younger generations love making videos on Tik Tok and YouTube, and more and more of them see this as a possible career and way to earn a nice income, so watch this space.

Influencers

Social media and the Internet have enabled a new class of workers that didn’t previously exist: the influencers. 

Influencers publicise their often glamorous lives on social media such as Instagram or Facebook or are experts who write about their areas of expertise on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium or Quora. They make money by promoting products and services, which can be their own or someone else’s, to their gazillions of followers.

Being an influencer is becoming a career aspiration for many young people. Some of them will get there, but many others won’t, so many disappointments are bound to happen. 

By its very nature, this is a small niche market, but it’s growing and will continue growing more throughout this decade and beyond, becoming a viable career path for those with the right talents (or looks).

These are not clear-cut categories. For example, a content creator can also be an influencer, thanks to the quality of their content, and megastar influencers can be part of the gig economy.

In search of purpose

Human beings need a purpose as much as they need food and water.

Management gurus and leadership experts finally realised this maxim a few years ago, so now everybody talks about how critical having a meaningful purpose is. It is all the rage to have leaders with values that go beyond maximising shareholder value.

It has become one of the most important workplace trends shaping the future of work. It is a welcome one. 

Contrary to what many thinkers thought during the last decades, companies do not exist only to make money for their shareholders. They have other responsibilities towards all their stakeholders and the communities where they operate. Sustainability, different sorts of activisms, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have gained increasing relevance in the last few years, and this will only continue in the rest of this decade and beyond.

Organisations are made of people and they are led by leaders. 

This means leaders with an inspiring purpose will have an edge. 

Read more: How to find your career purpose in four simple steps and The Purposeful Leader: 5 Essential Characteristics to Be One

Lifelong Learning

In an increasingly complex and chaotic world, where more and more skills will be automated, employees who want to remain relevant will have to continue learning throughout their entire lives. 

Lifelong learning is another crucial workplace trend.

Gone are the days when people studied when they were young to get ready to work in adulthood, and that was more or less it for the rest of their lives, save a few corporate training sessions here and there. Now people need to keep learning all their lives, even after they retire, as it is likely that retirees will have to work on and off in the future, remaining in a state of permanent semi-retirement.

People won’t only learn in academic settings. They will profit from the diverse array of learning methods available to them today: learning on the job, watching tutorials online, virtual reality immersion, mentoring and coaching, gaming, and a long et cetera. 

There is no excuse not to learn new skills and competencies, and you better do, as those who don’t will be left behind.

Employee well-being

For a decade starting with a major health crisis like the 2020s, an expected trend is an increased concern from organisations for the health and well-being of their employees.

During the pandemic, many companies made herculean efforts to take care of their employees’ well-being, both physical and mental. Since then, the efforts have continued, focusing more on mental health. Believe it or not, there is a war for talent raging on, and companies that don’t take care of their employees will be on the losing side.

Mental health used to be a taboo topic, but it shouldn’t be.

HR departments and leaders in today’s organisations don’t want to be responsible for the stress, burnout and other mental health issues afflicting their employees. So they are taking action. Organisations are taking care of their employees’ well-being because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is good for business, as it attracts talent, improves engagement and increases productivity.

Considering all these benefits, this is a workplace trend we will see more of in the coming years. 

Be ready for these workplace trends

These are the most important trends that will shape the workplace from now to 2030 and beyond. They will cause the main changes occurring in the workplace. 

The workers and leaders who aren’t ready for the world these trends are shaping will suffer; those who understand them and can leverage them will thrive.

How do you feel about these trends? Are you prepared to make the most out of them?

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This is the second article in the Possible Futures series, where we look at a dystopian world and a collapsing society. It is hard to imagine today, but it could well happen.

Read the other articles in the Possible Futures series: Possible Futures – A day in your life in 2040 and Possible Futures – Life in the Age of Abundance

For more on the future state of the world, read The world in 2050 and What will the world be like in 2100?

It is the year 2050, and life on Earth is hell. You wonder how we got to such a dire situation, but you aren’t surprised. After all, everything that could go wrong went wrong in the last few decades. It was Murphy’s Law in steroids and year after year. So now you live in a dystopian world.

It isn’t easy to pinpoint the year when everything started to go downhill. In the 2010s, there were some issues with political polarisation incited by social media muddying the waters, rising inequality, and the world started to get too warm, but life was still okay. The economy wasn’t too bad, and most people had a job.

How it started

If you had to pick one year, you would go with 2020, but it was a gradual process. The world had been warming for decades before that, but we didn’t want to see it, or if we did, we thought we could save the bullet. Sadly, we are now suffering the consequences.

You chose 2020 because that was the year of the pandemic. Since then, everything has gone pear-shaped. We have had a few decent years after that, all in the 20s and beginning of the 30s. Mostly, the three decades that have passed since then have been terrible. An unmitigated disaster.

First, it was the pandemic, with millions of deaths and the halt of the world economy for a couple of years. Many governments injected too much money with the hope of rescuing their economies, which they did, but at the expense of creating persistently high inflation. The Russo-Ukranian war that lasted a couple of years didn’t help either, so we had hyperinflation in many countries hitherto economically sound, like your beloved Germany. 

Then we had the war between the US and China. They had had a trade war going on from the 10s, with escalating sanctions and trade limitations for almost a decade, until the situation exploded, and China invaded Taiwan. The gloves were off then. Everybody thought it would be a short war and that the US, which was supposed to have the military advantage, would prevail, but both assumptions were wrong. 

The war lasted four years, and China prevailed, ushering in a new world order for the 2030s. This obviously had an impact on the US but also on all its allies, including the EU, where you lived.

An authoritarian and dystopian world

The EU, which had been a model of liberal democracy, was forced to change its model. It became an authoritarian and dystopian world, all enabled by the great powers of Artificial Intelligence and the advances in surveillance technology, which allowed a few people to control the great masses like never before. Even Orwell wouldn’t have been able to imagine the extent to which this government was able to control the minds of the population. 

Similar authoritarian governments sprouted everywhere, so there was nowhere to run to. No free country or democracy as we knew it. 

The power of AI

Economically, Artificial Intelligence displaced most existing jobs, without creating new ones as had happened previously in history. Industrial robots and other technological advances had been replacing workers for decades, if not centuries, but new, more attractive jobs were always created. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with the AI revolution in the 20s and 30s. 

All was fun and jokes when AI started writing texts that made sense and drawing paintings and pictures when given the right instructions. It was cute until it wasn’t. AI was soon better than any human content creator. They were also better at analysing data and patterns, making recommendations, diagnosing illnesses, and a long list of many other things. 

Before you could say “artificial intelligence”, the machines had taken over all manufacturing, creative, clerical and administrative jobs and the few middle management ones that were left (there was not much to manage anyway). Even jobs for which we thought caring and emotional intelligence were required were displaced. People didn’t mind having robot nurses, teachers or servers, after all.

This should have been great. If machines can do everything needed, human beings could indulge in those times of abundance and let loose all their creative juices. People thought a new renaissance of the human spirit would come out of this transformation, but nothing further from the truth. Governments weren’t ready, companies weren’t ready, and society as a whole wasn’t ready. Nobody was ready.

A world controlled by the very few

The upheaval was massive. Billions of people were unemployed in a timespan of a couple of years. In most countries, most wealth was amassed in the hands of the very few. We are talking about 0.001% of the population. All the rest didn’t get even the leftovers. 

As most companies are nowadays empty husks with only a handful of leaders at the very top and a few owners, all the wealth ended up in the hands of these very few.

These few mega-rich live in their own guarded enclaves, opulent and full of luxury inside, but as secure and drab as military camps outside. They don’t want to be disturbed by the discontented masses.

You lost your job as Marketing Manager in 2034, and you haven’t had a job since then. AI is doing your job, supposedly much better than you could ever hope to, and much cheaper. Since then, you have been living on the crumbs given by the government in what they grandiosely call the Universal Sufficient Income, but it isn’t universal nor sufficient.

At least you are alive

At least you are alive, you tell yourself, and you have your family and friends. One of those UN organisms, run by AI, of course, calculated that more than a billion people died in the last two decades due to the excessive warming of the planet. Other 2 billion have been displaced. The world population is now much smaller than in 2020. Almost all of Africa, Australia and big swathes of Asia and South America are unhospitable and too hot to live for humans.

You were lucky you were living in Germany, which was a coldish place most of the year and is now a rather warm country. Still, you see extreme weather phenomena every year, and life isn’t easy. Crops often go to waste, and many people are hungry. Robots and AI produce many things, but most people are poor.

When you were young, life was good, and it seemed to be getting better. Every year more people were coming out of poverty. We hadn’t had a big war in most of the world for decades, most people had decent jobs, and the prospects were good. Everybody thought things could only get better. Somewhere something went terribly wrong, and here you are now, living a terrible life in a dystopian world. 

You ask yourself, once again, “how did we get here? What could we have done differently to avoid this hell?” 

But you can’t think of any good answer.

How do you feel about this future? Could you see yourself living in it? It is a terrible world, but we may end up living in a similar one. How can we avoid this dystopian future? We build the future with our actions today, so we better start working on the right things already.

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The post A dystopian world – The collapse of society appeared first on Humane Future of Work.

What will the world be like in 2050? It will be different, but how different? It is hard to say, but we can look at some trends to see the direction we will be taking in the next three decades.

The world in 2050 is sufficiently far from us to feel foreign, strange and exciting but close enough that we can try to guess the way it will look like based on current trends. 

I did a similar exercise on What will the world be like in 2100? 2100 felt so far away that it gave us some safe space to speculate and provide some generic thoughts on the possible direction the world could take. For 2050, we are still far into the future and, therefore, in the realm of forecasts and scenarios, not predictions, but we can come closer and be more specific about the direction the world is taking. 

The world isn’t deterministic; thus, the world of 2050 has yet to be decided. This means we still have some scope to create that world through our actions today and in the coming years. 

Let’s see what kind of world we build. 

Climate Change

Let’s start with the most concerning trend. The earth is warming at an accelerating rate, which will have terrible consequences for all of us. 

There was this sadly funny twit doing the rounds last summer, where a British journalist was compared to the TV hosts in the movie Don’t Look Up, and rightly so, because of her dismissive and careless attitude towards the weather.

Like this journalist, many people think this is a joke. “Isn’t it nice to have a bit of warmer weather and more sunshine?”. Well, to start with, global warming doesn’t mean more sun. It will cause more rain as water evaporates faster and more of it is in the atmosphere. 

By 2050, the maps of the world we are used to might get out of date as sea levels rise up to 25 or 30 cm. They have already risen by a similar amount in the last 100 years. Some islands and low coastlines will suffer enormously, and all countries with a coastline will have to invest billions of dollars in accommodating their coastlines to avoid flooding and other related disasters.

The last eight years have been the hottest on record, with 2021 being the 6th hottest in history. This trend will continue, and when we get to 2050, we will remember the hot summer of 2022 as a coolish one. 

Freakish weather, wildfires, polar caps melting, more frequent natural disasters and many other terrible things will continue happening in the next three decades and beyond. If we haven’t already passed the point of no return, we are close to it.

The IPCC has made some recommendations on how to combat climate change. Governments, organisations and most people don’t grasp the criticality of our situation. 

Many proponents believe technology will save us once again. Somebody will invent some new technology that will allow us to store all the carbon in the atmosphere, cool it down, or something new we don’t even know exists today. This might be true, technology can achieve wondrous things in this exponential age, but I wouldn’t count on it. 

Waiting for the technological miracle allows us to kick the proverbial can on the road, hope for a better future and avoid taking the necessary actions in the present. 

If technology saves us, so be it, but we shouldn’t count on it. We should start doing everything we can today to reduce our carbon footprint, which means travelling less, consuming less energy, and changing many of our pernicious habits. It is possible to have a similar life to what we live today and reduce our emissions considerably. 

It can be done, and we have to if we don’t want to get to 2050 with billions of displaced and starving people due to climate change.

Demographic shifts

In 2050 I will be 71 years old. I should be wiser than today and hope to get there in good health, but most people would agree that my best years will be past me by then. 

The same will happen to most of the people reading this article today. We will all be rather old by 2050. Even the currently youthful Gen Zers of today will be middle-aged men and women in their fifties. 

Who will replace them? The next generation after Gen Z seems to be Generation Alpha, born from the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s. This generation is still comprised of children, so it is difficult to tell what traits they will share. I hope when they grow up to be in charge, they will be able to tackle the world’s problems better than we did. 

The ageing of today’s society is an issue already and will only worsen over the years. In many Western and some Asian countries, the fastest-growing age cohort in the next decade will be people over 65, and this trend will only grow in the following decades. In many Western countries, more than a third of the population will be over 60 in 2050. This will cause a considerable strain on these societies’ working populations and their governments’ resources. This could be solved by migration from other countries and automation, but these problems bring their own challenges.

Automation deserves its own space in this article, so we’ll treat this topic below. Immigration is supposed to come from younger and usually poorer countries, but cultural assimilation and integration are problematic. Also, these countries won’t remain young for long. The demographic pyramid has started getting inverted in some of them already, and it is likely that by 2050 many of them will be ageing as well. 

African countries will be the last ones inverting this pyramid and the last ones to stop growing, so by 2050, many of the world’s most populous countries will be in Africa. As a continent, it will be the second most populous after Asia, doubling its population from today’s 1.3 billion to 2.5 billion in 2050. 

The West, if we also consider Eastern countries such as Japan, Korea, Australia and the like, currently has a population of 1 billion people. This will remain more or less stable, mainly thanks to immigration.

What are the implications of this for the world of 2050? It’s too early to tell, but I hope that the growth in Africa will bring new impetus and reinvigorating energy to the way we look at arts, business, technology and all the rest globally. 

Read more: Demographic shifts and the Future of Work

Technological disruption

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”

Roy Amara

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. 

These words by Roy Amara, a famous American scientist and futurist, are known as Amara’s Law. It is not a law set in stone like those in the Natural Sciences or Physics, but it does tend to happen. 

Today nobody knows what kind of technology we will have in 2050, not even the keenest futurist, well-researched scientist or most avid technologist. Nobody. Part of it is because of Amara’s Law. In three decades, a technology that is nascent today or hasn’t even adequately developed has time to grow exponentially to proportions we cannot begin to imagine today. 

We tend to underestimate how much technology can impact our lives over decades.

We live in the Exponential Age, and many of the technologies changing our world are growing ever faster. This means that the world in 2050 will be very different to today’s, but we don’t know where the main differences will lay. 

We can speculate about it, though, and speculate we will. 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is one of today’s most significant technological advances, and it will continue growing and improving. Many people believe AI is a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the combustion engine, and therefore it is having and will continue to have a profound impact on many other technologies, industries, business models, and the way we live our lives. It will transform our society. It is already doing it.

It will have a considerable impact on the way we work too. It will probably displace many jobs through automation. If this follows up with previous technological upheavals in history, many new jobs may be created, so there wouldn’t be any problem, or it could be different this time. We could go the same way as the horses at the beginning of the 20th century and disappear from the job market.

We will see, but we’ll probably have a clearer view of how this is going by 2050. We might even have reached the stage where we have conscious AI by then, or passed the Singularity and not look back. Many people are already very excited about what’s happening with ChatGPT and similar natural language processing technologies, even if they are still far away from emulating general intelligence or having any sort of sentience or consciousness.

The probability of achieving Artificial General Intelligence before 2050 is small, but it is not zero, and if this happens, then all the bets are off. The world would be a very different place. 

Read more: The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work

Healthcare and increased lifespan

The Singularity proponents believe we will reach a point in the next couple of decades where advances in AI, biology, and nanotechnology will mean that we will either become a-mortal or be able to upload our consciousness into a computer.

I believe we are still far from either of these options, if we ever get there. Still, it is possible that we will have significant advances in medicine and bioengineering and that by 2050 we will be able to increase our lifespans considerably (or perhaps only the wealthiest members of society might be able to pull the trick).   

Also, thanks to CRISPR and other advances in genetics, design babies will be an option. They are already technically possible, but ethically and legally, we are far. Will our moral values change enough in three decades that choosing the colour of your children’s eyes becomes a reality by 2050? 

I’m not so sure. Mores tend to lag technology and science, and they change more gradually, but society seems to be changing faster and faster every decade, so it could be. I find it abhorrent today, but will I think the same in a few decades?

Digital world

We spend more and more time in the digital world. Today we spend more time on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like, or playing Fortnite or Call of Duty, than walking in a forest or meeting friends face to face. Will we spend most of our time in the Metaverse tomorrow?

This is what Mark Zuckerberg wants us to do, and he may get it. The trend towards further digitalisation and us spending more time online hasn’t lost any pace, and it seems to be increasing. Also, advances in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality will make the experience of digital immersion much better with time. 

However, trends often stop or reverse. They sometimes work like pendulums, they go one way, and when people get tired or get a reaction against them, they go in the opposite direction. 

There have been increasingly more vocal voices raising the alarm about the harm social media does to people, their pernicious effect on the political discourse and how they increase polarisation and radicalisation. The surveillance capitalist model of Big Tech has been denounced (see below), and some people are making a conscious effort to spend less time online.

During the covid pandemic, many people spent more time at home and connected to virtual worlds, both for leisure and work. This seemed to be an irreversible trend, but this isn’t so clear. Some people are returning to the offices, and the tech companies’ results in the last year have stalled. 

We may have gotten enough of the digital world and decide to spend more time in the real world in the next few decades. I wouldn’t count on it, but you never know, stranger things have happened. 

A shifting World Order

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen

Vladimir Lenin

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”, said Lenin, who knew a thing or two about revolutions and tumultuous times. 

Will the three decades we have to 2050 be some of those when not much happens? Or will there be eventful years, with the World Order changing considerably? I don’t have a crystal ball, but I suspect it might be more of the second. 

As I wrote in Geopolitics of the Future, the next few decades will probably see a growing conflict between China and the US for their supremacy in the world. This clash might not result in a conventional war (fingers crossed!), but there are many ways in which two superpowers can compete and try to harm each other. We have seen some of them in the last years with the Trade War they started in 2018 and the sanctions the US recently imposed on the use of semiconductors and high-performance chips by the Chinese.

We are in a multipolar world and will continue being in one in the next few decades, but with different protagonists. The US and China will continue being top dogs, but their relative weight might differ. China’s last couple of years haven’t been as stellar as they used to be, and its population may have already peaked or is about to. China may never surpass the US in GDP, which was a given only a few years back.

India will probably surpass China in population in 2023 to become the world’s most populous country. It has some structural issues it will have to address, but if they do so, it will be another great power to consider in the next few decades.

Russia’s reputation as a power is being considerably damaged by its dismal performance in the war in Ukraine, so it will continue being a nuclear power with a lot of natural resources but a diminished influence beyond its borders. I wouldn’t be surprised if its governing system suffered significant changes from here to 2050. Putin will not be alive or in good enough health to govern by then, and whether he will be replaced by another strongman or a proper democratic government is anybody’s guess. 

European countries, including Britain, will also have a reduced influence in the new world order of 2050. This influence will be more in line with their size and presence worldwide. It is a small region, after all. The European Union will continue suffering existential crises that threaten its very existence, but it will probably trundle along. 

The chances of the UK entering the EU again are not nil. It isn’t likely, but it is possible. The last few years have been tumultuous for the British, and some voices are already asking for a new referendum, only six years after the last one. In almost three decades, many more things can happen. 

Asia and Africa, and to a lesser degree, Latin America, will be the regions with increased influence. The main economic growth will come from these regions, which will also have younger and more vibrant populations. I am excited to see what they can do with this increased influence. 

The workplace of 2050

This is a blog about the Future of Work, so we couldn’t finish the article without including some brushstrokes of how the world of work might look like in 2050 based on current workplace trends.

New jobs 

The first surprising change we will probably notice in the workplace of 2050 is that many jobs we are used to seeing today will no longer exist, and many other new ones will. Also, many of today’s jobs will have enhanced functions and new duties, thanks to AI and other technological innovations. 

How big will the onslaught on jobs caused by AI and robots be? It is difficult to tell, but my bet is that quite big. As we have seen above, AI has evolved a lot in the last decade, but it’s also seen some breakthroughs in the last couple of years, and it will displace many jobs. That means they will be fewer or no clerical, and admin jobs, many manufacturing and middle management jobs will disappear, and we will have new jobs, which their job title we cannot even imagine today. 

Future leader

These new jobs and the entry of new, non-human types of intelligence in the workplace will require a new kind of leader with new leadership qualities. The future leader will be Future Ready, have an inspiring Purpose, excel at People Skills and be obsessed with Personal Growth. Leaders without these qualities will not succeed in 2050 (or 2030, for that matter).

Flexibility

There is no going back to the world before covid. Flexible working arrangements are here to stay, and white-collar employees will expect from their companies the possibility to work from anywhere and at any time. As mentioned, this will require a new type of leader and a new type of organisation, more decentralised and distributed than the ones we have today. 

Gig economy and digital platforms

The gig economy is also here to stay. The formula isn’t currently working in all sectors, but there will be new iterations, and by 2050, more and more professionals will be selling their services and skills in digital marketplaces enabled by digital platforms.

There will likely be two classes of digital gig workers. In an increasingly winner-takes-all market powered by digital platforms, some super-skilled professionals will get vast sums of money as they get to scale their services via the Internet and sell them to a significant share of the market (superstar professors or speakers, for example). 

At the other end of the spectrum, there will be massive competition for low-qualification jobs that AI and robots haven’t automated. This market sector will be ripe for exploitation and bad practices from corporations. We’ll have to watch out to avoid having a subclass of workers who live in worse conditions in 2050 than in 2020.

Surveillance capitalism (and communism)

The last decade has brought us the phenomenon that Zhousana Zuboff has termed Surveillance Capitalism, which is based on Big Tech companies amassing huge troves of our data and surveilling everything we do on the Internet to make money out of it. We are being watched without us realising or consenting to it. 

A similar phenomenon, even increased, is happening in other more autocratic communist societies, such as China, where citizens are being constantly watched with the help of modern technology. 

This trend will likely continue accelerating, and the world in 2050 will probably be under constant surveillance, with some hints of Orwell’s dystopian 1984. 

The future hasn’t been written yet, so there is a slight possibility that some parts of society will start getting concerned about the intensive surveillance they are subject to, and a movement against it is started and is successfully changing the status quo. 

We have seen some movement around this, with, for example, the Social Dilemma documentary and the work of organisations such as the Centre for Humane Technology. Still, it is unclear what impact they will have in changing the world for the better and if they will avoid this significant shift happening before 2050.

Remembering the 90s

Do you remember what life was like in the 90s? And what were you like? (if you are old enough to remember them or if you were already alive then, that is) I was a teenager then, so I was a somewhat different person, and life was also quite different, but still, there has been some continuity. We didn’t have smartphones, and the Internet was starting, but many other things are more or less the same today. 

The world has changed a lot since then, but has it really? We are the same Cro-Magnons with fancy clothes and fascinating gadgets. 

But what do the 90s have to do with 2050? You guessed it right: today, in 2022, we are at the same distance from 1994 than from 2050. If you remember 1994 as not so far away, it may feel the same when you are in 2050 and look back to 2022. It may look even closer as time seems to go faster as you get older. 

When you get to 2050 and look back to the last three decades, you will see that life was different back in the 20s but wasn’t so different after all. Hopefully, you will also feel that we have built a better world and that life is at least a bit better than it used to be back in 2022. 

For fictional scenarios of the future, read Possible Futures – A day in your life in 2040, A dystopian world – the collapse of society and Possible Futures – Life in the Age of Abundance

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