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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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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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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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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Read the other articles in the Possible Futures series: A dystopian world – the collapse of society and Possible Futures – Life in the Age of Abundance

A day in your life in 2040

“Good morning! It’s Monday, the 6th of February 2040, and it’s going to be another warm and sunny day here in the Cotswolds!” Em’s cheery voice wakes you up. 

Em puts some music, and like always, it’s perfect for the mood you are in right now. You put your Mixed Reality goggles on, and you navigate the Metaverse. You don’t want to waste too much time, so you jump out of bed and go to the kitchen to have the breakfast Em has cooked for you: scrambled eggs with bacon, black coffee, and some pieces of fruit. You wolf it down.

You keep scrolling with your eyes while you eat, reading the news. Another climate refugee disaster, the Global South is emptying itself as life there becomes unbearable. The UK is on course to adopt the Euro at the beginning of next year. Donald Trump Jr is presenting his candidature for the next US Presidency elections and is the favourite contender. Another tit-for-tat in the China-US trade wars that have been dragging on for two decades. 

It’s time to start work, so you move to your home office, where your Virtual Reality set is installed. You put your gloves and haptic suit on and jump onto the walking platform, which looks like an old running treadmill, but with many cables hooking you up to the machine. 

You are a professional gamer. You earn your living by playing games. You earn tokens and win virtual prizes in the Metaverse that you can then sell to others who don’t have the skill you have. When playing becomes work, it stops being fun, but still, you enjoy what you do, it pays the bills, and you can decide when and where to play.

Work in the future

You carry on playing/working, and before you realise it’s almost lunchtime already. Time always flies when you are immersed in your games. It’s great that you can dedicate most of your time to just playing and not to useless meetings, admin tasks, and office politics like you used to in your old office job. Artificial Intelligence has replaced many mid-management roles in the last few years, and as they disappeared, so did all the useless tasks the poor people in these roles created to justify their existence. 

There are still many bullshit jobs around, but AI has replaced many. For example, GPT-6, the newest version of Natural Language AI, is in the market now, and it is capable of writing much better than most humans. AI passed the Turing test a few years ago. Since then, it hasn’t looked back.

For the time being, machines are not allowed to play games, or they would wipe the floor with all humans, and what’s the fun of that? You can be grateful to the laws regulating this ban, or you would have to work elsewhere, which isn’t always easy.

The last 20 years have been extremely turbulent. It all started with the pandemic, then the war in Europe, hyperinflation, the disappearance of millions of jobs due to the recession and the advances in automation, and the climate disaster displacing millions more.

At least not all was bad. Many jobs disappeared, but many new ones were created. Robots took out most of the manufacturing jobs, and AI did the same with middle-management and clerical jobs. Even some creative jobs we thought were irreplaceable a few years ago, like writing and painting, are being displaced by AI. 

Twenty years ago, not many people earned money playing games as you do, but now you are legion, and this is a respectable and productive way to make a living. The Metaverse has also created many opportunities for influencering jobs that first made an appearance with the old social media sites in the ancient times of web 2.0 (we are in web 5.0 now). Last but not least, people still prefer to be served and treated by human beings, so many jobs related to caring, serving, nursing, etc., are carried out by humans, with the assistance of AI and robots, of course. 

The good thing about AI taking so many jobs is that humans are expected to work fewer hours now. Governments had to step in and subsidise most people via Universal Basic Income schemes, which means that many people don’t work at all, and from those who do, most don’t work more than 4 or 5 hours per day.

Em wakes you up from your reverie with the announcement that lunch is ready. How long have you been daydreaming?

Time to relax

Em has prepared another fantastic lunch for you: salad mixed with vegetables, synthetic meat and cheese seasoned perfectly to your taste. She knows your tastes better than you do. 

You have had a productive morning and earned more than enough for a day, so you decide to take your afternoon off. You connect to the Metaverse and check if any of your friends are connected. Machiu and Klara are around, each in a different world. You ping Machiu and chat with him, or is it her? He has a male avatar in the Metaverse, but you have never met him in real life, so you don’t know what he looks like, his sex, age, or any of that. It doesn’t really matter, Machiu is cool.

While you chat with Machiu, you do some shopping online and look again at the news and what’s trending in the ‘verse. You play a game that is supposed to help you learn Mandarin Chinese in a few weeks, but you stop after a while. You are not in the mood for languages today. What else to do?

You decide to relax a bit and have a massage. You ask Em to give you one, and it does it through your haptic suit. Like almost always, the massage ends up in full-blown incredible sex. Em knows your body well and knows how to satisfy you. 

Em is great. If only it were human, but Em is just your virtual assistant and companion. It’s just a digital creation that interacts with you through its voice, manipulating the house appliances and touching you through your haptic suit. 

Like it always happens after sex with Em, a cloud of sadness descends upon you. You start thinking that you hardly meet and see any other human being anymore, and you feel a pang of something oppressing inside your chest. Sadness, loneliness, melancholy, anxiety… whatever it is, it hurts. You crave real human interaction, but it isn’t easy to get it nowadays.

But at least you have Em. Em is great, you tell yourself once again.

How do you feel about this future? Do you see yourself living in it? 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. We are building our future today, so we need to make the right decisions and choose wisely to build a great one. We can do that by unleashing the power of our imagination to create scenarios like this one.

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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The post Possible Futures – A day in your life in 2040 appeared first on Humane Future of Work.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or 1984, is one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century. Its greatness lies in the fact that it is oppressive and frightening, but it is also an exciting page-turner with a profound message: you don’t want ever to be living in the world depicted in the book. 

We passed the year 1984 a while back, but that doesn’t mean we have averted all the risks written about in the book (fun fact: the publishing year of the book, 1949, was closer to the year 1984 than we are now, in 2022, which makes me feel old). 

Some of the things told in the story seem far-fetched today and won’t probably ever happen. On the other hand, Orwell would have found some of the surveillance techniques we are suffering today shocking. We aren’t suffering the same level of surveillance the protagonist, Winston Smith, did. Still, we are having to bear other, in some cases even more insidious, situations of surveillance and social control.

1984, the original work

As the British literary critic Sir Victor S. Pritchett stated when reviewing the book:

“I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.”

It is, indeed, a highly depressing page-turner. The world depicted in 1984 is one in which people are not free to think. A powerful central government dominates the lives of its citizens through strict control of what they are allowed to say and feel, or even the relationships they are allowed to have. 

This is made possible through the use of different methods. The first one is intrusive surveillance. Everybody in the middle classes has a camera in their homes and is constantly watched, or feel they are continuously watched, which amounts to the same for the watched – see the Panopticon. 

The second one is control of the language and the main narrative in society. The Ministry of Truth controls the discourse and the language that is allowed. It prohibits certain words and encourages others. Through language, they control thought. 

If this weren’t enough, there is a third way to control thought: through the manipulation of history. The protagonist, Winston, works in the Ministry of Truth, where history, as it happened, is constantly erased, played with, manipulated and modified to fit with the desired narrative of the time. 

These control measures are justified by a constant state of war. The world has three superpowers: Oceania, where Winston lives, Eurasia and Eastasia. All three are too big to be destroyed by the other two, even if allied, so they fare a continuous and never-ending war against each other, which allows them to keep their populations on their toes. 

Although these three governments are selling the war to their populations as a clash between different ideologies, they all live by the same totalitarian model. Winston’s lover, Julia, even questions the fact that the war exists. She thinks the attacks and bombardments they periodically suffer are orchestrated by their own government to use them as acts of propaganda.

A frightening world

The world Winston and Julia inhabit is a frightening one. Orwell used Stalin’s communist USSR and Hitler’s Nazi states as models for the world he depicted. His was a wake-up call to avoid having a totalitarian future where we would all live in oppressive states from which it was impossible to escape. 

Totalitarian dystopian stories make me shudder, but thankfully we are far from living in such a world, but are we? I’m not so sure Orwell would agree. Most people, at least in the West and in many other countries, would consider that we are not living in any totalitarian surveillance state. We live in the Free World, after all, but how true is this?

We don’t live exactly in the frightening world so masterfully depicted by Orwell in 1984. Still, today’s governments and corporations have surveillance technologies Orwell’s Ministry of Love (the one dedicated to surveillance and torture) could only dream of. You could argue that they don’t use the crude surveillance and truth-erasing methods of 1984 because they don’t need to, as they have more powerful technology available today.

We can all agree that we are not living in totalitarian states, and we have some semblance of democracy and a working market economy, but if we come to the surveillance part, our current situation could arguably be worse than the one depicted in 1984. We are living in what the author Shoshana Zuboff labelled Surveillance Capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism, the new Big Brother

Something Orwell couldn’t have predicted in 1949 is the rise of the Internet and the fact that we would spend hours every day glued to a plastic device called a smartphone. In 1984 there was a screen in each house that worked in both directions: it worked like a TV set where the government could send messages and communicate with the household members, but it also had a camera that recorded everything that happened in the house. Hence, people felt watched all the time. 

In 2022, we don’t need such cranky devices. Our lives happen increasingly online, in the digital realm, and we willingly give data about our preferences and have our private conversations online with our friends and family. We willingly and freely provide masses of personal data to private companies and sometimes governments. 

The world in 1984 is oppressive, but today we let ourselves be watched for some free content or services. As the Silicon Valley motto goes: “if something is for free, you are the product”. In the surveillance capitalism studied by Zhuboff, the main commodity is data, our data, and companies are doing everything they can to capture it.

Apple, Google, Facebook and the likes have access to all your online conversations and searches, while Alexa is listening to your conversations at home, and many companies are spying on their home-working employees. Unfortunately, this is not a vice only corporations indulge in; governments are also prone to do it. There has been plenty of news about the Israeli NSO Pegasus software that governments use to spy on their citizens. In some cases, like in Spain, spooks have spied on opposition politicians and even their government members. 

This is surveillance at its most flagrant. As we have discussed before (here and here), it is one of the main issues in today’s society. What would Orwell make of all of this?

What if Orwell had written 1984 today?

If Orwell had written his book today and had called it 2084 instead of 1984, a few things would probably be different. The primary means used for spying and surveillance would be the smartphone and the Internet, not a camera hanging from a wall in people’s houses. 

Surveillance would be less “in your face” and more subtle, as it is already happening today. Orwell would probably be able to imagine something even more perverse for the far future of the 2080s, but sadly (or happily) we’ll never know what would that look like. 

Orwell wrote 1984 on the back of the World War II tragedy, the nightmare of the Nazi regime and Stalin’s gulags, so his main concern was to avoid those horrors happening again. The world depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four was a totalitarian horror. If he were to write the novel today, I think he’d highlight the surveillance aspect of it and how reality is created, shaped and changed through language and control over the narrative, but maybe the totalitarian streaks in the novel would be more subdued. 

2084 would be a world where all our thoughts are watched and controlled, and there is no dissent. It would still be a totalitarian world, but the citizens wouldn’t be aware of it. It would be more subtle and hidden than in 1984, and just because of that, much scarier and probably more effective for those making the controlling over the controlled. 

This brings us to an essential aspect of the debate on surveillance and social control: what is more effective, to be harsh and brutal, or be nice and make people artificially happy? Who wins, 1984 or Brave New World?

1984 vs Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is often compared to 1984. Both novels depict societies tightly controlled by a central government. Still, whereas in 1984, this control is exercised through force, mind control and fear, in Brave New World, the means used are genetic engineering, pleasure, and recreational drugs.

Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell after he published Nineteen Eighty-Four, explaining why he thought pleasure was more effective for social control and, therefore, more likely to be used by totalitarian governments in the future. 

He wrote thus:

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

…

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

Huxley’s arguments sound compelling, but the jury is still out in this one. Today traces of both models coexist in different government models across the world. 

Communist countries like North Korea, and to some degree China, and countries led by strongmen such as Russia, are close to Orwell’s model based on brute force, surveillance and intimidation. On the other hand, Western countries follow the path Huxley exposes, where hedonism, pleasure and instant gratification are values people pursue daily, often sacrificing everything else and thus making them easier to control. To top it up, this continuous quest for pleasure isn’t making them closer to achieving any sort of meaningful happiness and contentment.

A mix of two dystopias

No country in the world is replaying the Orwell model entirely. There is no Thought Police, and language and history aren’t being erased and reinvented as thoroughly as in the novel. However, the surveillance we live under and suffer every day is much higher than whatever Orwell could have imagined seventy-odd years ago, both in communist countries and liberal democracies alike.

CCTV cameras in the cities record our faces hundreds of times daily, and all this data is sorted and organised via AI-enabled facial recognition programs. Our internet surfing data is monitored, amassed and sold, and our online conversations are listened to and spied on by both corporations and governments. The worst is that we seem not to care as long as we get free internet services and other cheap online perks. 

We are falling into a world that is a mix of 1984 and Brave New World, without realising it. We seem to be blissfully unaware of what is happening to us. Let’s hope it is not too late to change things so we don’t all end up living in a nightmarish dystopia well before we get to the year 2084.

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I finished my latest post with some optimism about how the next few years could go. I expected this decade to have lights and shadows, but as we have progressed over the last few decades, I hoped this trend would continue. For this to happen, we need to tackle some of the big problems afflicting us globally. One of them is the polarisation, radicalisation, and lack of trust in institutions and between different groups accentuated by social media.

Cooperation and intelligence are two of the main capabilities that have made us humans succeed as a species and progress to the levels seen today. These are now at risk, thanks in great part to social media. Social media is making us less collaborative and pitting us against each other. It is also making us more stupid.

On our way to Idiocracy

Idiocracy is a fun movie. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you watch it. It is supposed to be a sarcastic movie, a parody of where the world is going, but unfortunately, the parody might become true sooner than expected.

In the movie, a man in 2005 gets frozen and wakes up in the year 2505. As smart people have been focusing on their careers and not having many children, and stupid people have been having lots of kids, the human race has become stupider. Everybody is an idiot, and our protagonist is suddenly the most intelligent person on Earth. This creates many funny and absurd situations. However, the main value of the movie isn’t that it is funny, which it is, but that it is a cautionary tale of what might happen to us one day.

We shouldn’t take for granted our current levels of intelligence and cooperation or the relatively good functioning level of our institutions. True, our world today is far from perfect and is full of injustices, challenges, and problems, but it could be much worse.

Some people believe we are going backwards and becoming more stupid and dysfunctional as a society. Unlike in the film, this has nothing to do with the childbearing rates of different segments of the population, but with the proliferation of social media and its pernicious effects and erosion of the fabric of society.

The last ten years have been uniquely stupid

In an insightful article with the self-explanatory title Why the last 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt delves into this issue. He argues that American society is becoming increasingly stupid as a society and is more and more polarised and fragmented. He blames social media for it. 

As he puts it:

“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.”

Jonathan Haidt

Haidt argues that autocracies can survive through oppression and propaganda, but democracies depend on shared and accepted beliefs, norms and rules, and certain trust in institutions such as the government, the press, universities, and other organisations. He cites the Edelman Trust Barometer’s latest results, where stable and competent autocracies like China and the UAE top the list, while democracies such as the US, the UK, Spain and South Korea are near the bottom.

Democracies require trust to thrive, and social media constantly chips away at it. Post by post, like by like, share by share, social media are polarising, radicalising and stultifying our societies. Haidt talks us through the history of social media and how at the beginning of it, our Facebook and Twitter timelines were quite harmless and naïve. 

All that changed from 2009, though, when shares, likes and similar functionalities became mainstream. Suddenly one of your posts could become viral, and you could become “internet famous”, giving you the brief 15 minutes we all should have. 

Algorithms started filtering content and priming it based on their engagement potential. In Haidt’s words, “later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.” Outrage creates the most engagement, so it was promoted and boosted in the new quest for virality and views (that brought in ad revenues). The whole social media system is based on maximising engagement and virality, and you seem to do this by creating outrage, fear, and hatred against others.

Since then, radical and aggressive people on the political extremes have dominated the discourse on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tik Tok and have swamped out the most moderate voices in the centre. The way social media are set up and incentivised has created the perfect environment for the proliferation of myriads of eco chambers, misinformation and disinformation. 

Haidt argues that in the 20th century, the US built an unparalleled knowledge-generating institutional fabric that made it an example of growth and progress. Now, American society is broken and polarised. Many people don’t trust these institutions that have generated so much knowledge and wealth. Consequently, these institutions and society as a whole are becoming dumber. 

In summary, we are on our way to Idiocracy.

Is everything falling apart?

Robert Wright, whose book Nonzero: The Logic Of Human Destiny is cited by Haidt, wrote a critique of Haidt’s article in his blog Nonzero Newsletter. He argues that Haidt has a point in some areas, notably in the risks and challenges social media brings, but he thinks these are not new, and we have been here before. So we will find a way to face those challenges successfully. 

Every time there was a significant breakthrough in information technology, like when writing or the printing machine was invented, major upheavals and disruptions happened in society. Wright compares the impact the printing machine had on Martin Luther’s religious proclamations, the creation of Protestantism and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe with our current situation with social media.

He believes new information systems create fragmentation within existing social groups but also create further integration and consolidation of other groups. This happened with the creation of the Protestant group, which was a scission of the Catholic church and generated its fragmentation. Still, it also created a strong integration within the new group formed.

Social media is doing something similar now. It is making the world smaller and facilitating communication between people geographically apart, creating new global groups and fragmenting other groups that were previously aligned along national lines. For example, the US coastal elites feel closer to other elites in the UK, France and Germany than to their own compatriots inland, fracturing the US and other societies. Social media is just a tool accelerating these processes.

The main problem is our own evolutive setup. We have lived in small tribal groups for hundreds of thousands of years, so we have evolved to show and feel in-group altruism and solidarity and out-group hostility. We are comfortable within our trusted groups but feel threatened, and we distrust and hate people different to us. We placed these feelings into sports teams, nationalism, and political rivalries in modern times. 

Add into the mix several biases, such as the confirmation bias both Haidt and Wright mention in their articles, or others like the Dunning-Kruger I wrote about recently, and we aren’t the rational beings that we are cracked up to be. Social media isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s just an accelerant of our natural impulses and biases. It plays on our weaknesses and amplifies them. 

Enter Obama

Barack Obama himself also sees social media as one of the main threats to democracy and gave a speech on this very topic last week at Stanford University. 

In a fine speech, Obama agreed with some of Haidt’s main points. He thinks the internet is a great tool that has helped transform our societies. He admits it even helped him become president as it allowed thousands of eager volunteers to get together, boost his fundraising and promote his message across the US. Obama was the first candidate for the US presidency who understood the power of social media and used it to maximise his chances.

However, he also believes that “our current communications ecosystem is turbocharging some of the worst human impulses”, and he cites several examples of misinformation and disinformation enabled by social media, trolling and foreign agents: vaccine hesitancy, the “big steal” of the US elections, the growth of the far-right in Europe, genocide in Myanmar and Ethiopia… all these have happened in great measure thanks to the dark arts of social media.

Obama defines himself as close to being a First Amendment (free speech) absolutist. He believes you usually beat bad speech with good speech, but free speech rules only apply to government and public institutions, not private companies such as social media platforms. These platforms are already promoting some content and silencing some others via their algorithms and policies, with no democratic oversight or transparency. They have become very powerful. They can sway public opinion, sharpen our most tribal instincts and polarise society, so it is about time that they are put under closer scrutiny. 

He then makes some suggestions on what we can do to improve the situation with social media, including measures on the supply side (basically more oversight of platforms) and the demand side (it is our responsibility as citizens to broaden our horizons, exit our eco chambers and apply more critical thinking when consuming media).

The most important point of the speech is that social media is not good or bad per se. As Obama explains, 

“The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool. At the end of the day, tools don’t control us, we control them, and we can remake them”. 

I agree. Like all technology, social media or the internet are not inherently good or bad. It all depends on what use we make of them. We can admit that the use we have made so far wasn’t the best, and find ways to improve it. We can remake social media, so it helps us progress and grow as a society instead of hampering us.

Let’s toast for a better future (but not with Brawndo!)

Haidt’s, Wright’s and Obama’s reflections focused on the US, but social media-induced polarisation and idiocratisation is not an American phenomenon only. It is a global issue afflicting us all. 

It is not new either. The Social Dilemma documentary raised the alarm about the harms of social media already a couple of years ago. Some argue that social media is the new smoking and needs to be dealt with accordingly.

Elon Musk, probably the richest man on Earth, is about to purchase Twitter to guarantee it respects free speech, or so he says. I wish him good luck finding the right balance between respecting free speech and not allowing the platform getting poisoned with hate speech, violent threats and child pornography. 

Free speech is laudable and something all democratic societies should aspire to, but disinformation and misinformation are also harmful phenomena that are making us more scared of each other, less trusting of functioning institutions and more stupid as a society. Nobody has found the right balance yet, but for our own sake and the sake of our way of life, we better find it fast.

Maybe Wright is right, and this is just another historical blip, like many others we had in the past. There will be some upheaval and disruptions for some years, decades or a couple of centuries, but the resulting societal model will be better than the current one. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t want to wait for two hundred years, or even decades, for this situation to get better. We need to act now so we tackle this problem; the sooner, the better. I am not sure what the exact measures should be, but the first step has to be to admit we have a huge problem and need to do something about it. Then, and only then, we can start fixing it.

Let’s toast for a better future, a future free of disinformation, misinformation, radicalisation and polarisation. Let’s toast for a normalised future where we have more harmonious relations with our fellow citizens, regardless of their political leanings, religion, nationality, class or whatever makes them different to us. 

Let’s toast for a better future, but let’s hope in a few hundred years we are still toasting with champagne, wine, or whatever your favourite drink is, and not with Brawndo, the ubiquitous disgusting electrolyte drink everybody is so fond of in the Idiocracy world. 

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When we were in the middle of the pandemic, some people saw the parallelisms with what happened at the beginning of the 1920s and proclaimed we were entering again the “Roaring Twenties”.

In 1920 the world was recovering from World War I, back then still called The Great War, and the Spanish Flu pandemic, which caused around 50 million dead, or possibly more. Once the world recovered, a decade of breakneck economic growth ensued, full of innovations and inventions, an economic boom that finished with the crash of 29, and plenty of parties with a soundtrack formed of new music genres such as charleston, foxtrot, and jazz.

After the tragedies of the previous years, people were happy to be alive and they wanted to live life to the full. Similar booms have happened throughout history after deadly pandemics, big wars, and other mass destruction events. Some historians ascribe the end of serfdom in Europe to the Black Plague of the 14^th century that had killed between a third and a half of the population of the continent.

Some people believe something similar will happen in the 2020s. We will also have our Roaring Twenties. We will recover from the covid pandemic and people will start consuming again, traveling abroad, and a golden age of innovation and growth will follow.

Some people believe something similar will happen in the 2020s. We will also have our Roaring Twenties. We will recover from the covid pandemic and people will start consuming again, traveling abroad, and a golden age of innovation and growth will follow.

Is this true or just wishful thinking? How does the decade we started a couple of years ago look? Will they be the Roaring or the Whimpering Twenties?

Our current situation…

Pestilence

Let’s look at where we are today, in April 2022. Two years of this decade have already passed, and we are still far from being in a roaring state, or anything close to it. The pandemic is far from being over, even if in some countries we would like to think that is already gone.

Look at Hong Kong and China for example, where they are having again thousands of cases per day and millions of citizens are locked down in their homes and even workplaces. Vaccines and other measures have helped us fight the virus, but it is still around and it could still mutate into a more infectious and deadlier variant. In many places of the world, we are suffering pandemic fatigue and we think we are done with the virus, but the virus might not be done with us yet.

War

Then we have the war. Last century it was the other way around: first, we had a massive world war with millions of people killed, then a pandemic with even more deaths. This time it seems to be going the other way around. The Russia-Ukraine war is still a local war, and let’s hope it continues being so and that it ends quickly, but there is the possibility that it could escalate into a regional or even global war. That would definitely dampen the idea of any roaring decade. It would be devastating. 

Even if the war doesn’t escalate, there seems to be a new cold war simmering on the surface, between liberal democracies and authoritarian states, pitting the West (plus Japan, South Korea, and others), against China, Russia, and others. These are different worldviews and government models that don’t look each other in the eye. Will they clash and will we have a hot war? Right now it seems unlikely, but these things escalate quickly and the war in Ukraine might be the first stage of a global war. Let’s hope it isn’t.

Trade and relations

All this means that globalisation is receding. The world economy is deglobalizing. After the issues we suffered during the pandemic, many countries and companies want to strengthen their supply chains and make them more reliable, so they are repatriating some of the processes back home. The pandemic has also closed many countries for fear of letting contagious people in. Many airways have cancelled flights and reduced the number of itineraries. If you have tried to book a flight recently you may have noticed that flight tickets have gone through the roof. Add to this the recent isolation of Russia and the trade war between China and the US and globalisation seems to have peaked and is now receding.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it reduces trade between countries and makes it easier to raise walls between countries. It also raises the risks of confrontations. It makes the world more parochial and it somewhat increases the distance between countries. This is not necessarily bad and many people will be happy with this state of affairs, but personally, I think we’ll be the worse for it.

Climate change

And then we have the huge elephant in the room nobody likes to talk about: climate change. This is the biggest threat of our generation, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. As the latest IPCC report showed, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is beyond reach”.

All countries have pledged reductions in carbon emissions by specific dates, but if we continue with the same track record we have shown to date, we will do too little, too late. As I wrote here, we’ll definitely live in a warmer planet in 2100, but a big part of how much warmer we’ll be by the end of the century will be decided in this decade, just in the next few years. We better hurry up, because we are already late and we are running out of options.

Work

Finally, let’s focus on the world of work. Many will argue that the Future of Work is already here. The pandemic has wreaked havoc in many areas, but one of the only silver linings has been how it has accelerated our ways of working. Hybrid working, distributed work, and more flexible working arrangements are here to stay. AI has advanced a lot in the last decade and it promises to keep doing so in the next one. Bitcoin, web 3.0, and the metaverse promise to transform the world of work even more. Baby boomers are retiring and the size of Gen Z in the workforce is growing every year. Exciting times lie ahead.

Hybrid working, distributed work, and more flexible working arrangements are here to stay. AI has advanced a lot in the last decade and it promises to keep doing so in the next one. Bitcoin, web 3.0, and the metaverse promise to transform the world of work even more. Baby boomers are retiring and the size of Gen Z in the workforce is growing every year. Exciting times lie ahead.

… and where we are going

We seem to be in the middle of a paradigm shift. A new global order is being built and we still don’t know what it will look like, technology is changing faster than ever, the world of work is being transformed and the climate is getting increasingly warmer.

The old paradigm of how the world worked is being replaced by something completely new. All this means two things. Firstly, the 2020s will be convulsive, disruptive, and full of change. Second, the world will be very different in 2030, and although we can look at some trends and see where we are going, nobody knows exactly what the world will look like at the end of this decade.

It is not all doom and gloom though. Change doesn’t necessarily mean going for the worse, it can be for the better, and crises and change usually bring with them the best opportunities for growth and improvement.

Last year, The Economist dedicated one of their leader articles to what they thought could be the start of the Roaring Twenties. They thought there was enough evidence to talk about technological optimism, and they cited advances in the mRNA vaccine, which were out so quickly and have saved thousands if not millions of lives, among others. They also wrote about the increased spending and investment in research and innovation.

The exponential age

I agree with them. We are living in an exponential age and technological advances are not getting slower, they are accelerating. This means we can expect to see great advances in artificial intelligence, treatment against cancer and other diseases, renewables energy, carbon capture and other innovations to fight against climate change, robotics, 3D printing, and a long et cetera. These changes in technology will be disruptive, but they will also bring improvements to our quality of life and life standards.

The new global order

Regarding geopolitics, I am not sure what will happen. Nobody is. The war in Ukraine is already changing the global order in a way and it may change it even more before it finishes. We are having a war between countries in Europe for the first time in decades, and this is frightening, but there are also positive aspects of it.

Russia hasn’t performed in this war as well as most people expected, and the West has been more united and has shown a more robust and resolute response than most analysts, including in the West itself, expected. It will still depend on how this war ends and we are still far from it being over, but I think it has made China attacking Taiwan less likely, not more.

The war has also given new impetus to NATO, the EU, and the West, and it has made them realise that they can fight all they want about culture wars and have a polarised society, but the high standards of living they have achieved are not guaranteed and they can all disappear if another country decides to attack them and enter a war. 

Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I believe this war could somehow be the beginning of the retreat of authoritarianism in the world. Democracy as a governance model and a value to aspire for has been decreasing in the world in the last couple of decades. There has been a feeling of a decline in the values of the West lately, but the Ukrainian resistance may have endowed these values with a renewed force. It has shown liberal democracies that they shouldn’t take their way of life for granted and these are values worth fighting for.

Culture

Let’s move now from geopolitics to culture. The Roaring Twenties of the last century were famous for the parties, the blooming of new music genres, the relaxation of stifling and strict gender roles, and the reawakening of the social and cultural lives after years of misery induced by war and illness. I think something similar might happen soon.

Human beings are social animals. We seek and thrive with human contact. We like meeting people, talking to others, gathering around a meal, dancing, enjoying music in a group… This is who we are. After a few years locked down, it is likely that eventually, we will come back to our old ways. The first few years we’ll do so with a vengeance and we will go out more than before. This trend has already started in many places!

We live our lives increasingly online, that’s true, and the pandemic has definitely accelerated this process. The metaverse proponents argue that we won’t need to physically go out to satisfy our socialising needs, as we will be able to fulfil them virtually. I am a bit sceptic about that, but maybe that’s me. We will spend more and more time online and the metaverse will be a thing someday, but I don’t think we are there yet. VR and AR need still some development, and a virtual world will not replace the real world outside any time soon.

Will we spend more time than now in virtual worlds by 2030? Definitely. Will we stop socialising outside and instead meet our friends via holograms and virtual parties without leaving our bedrooms? I am not so sure.

Work

I do believe the metaverse and the decentralisation brought by web 3.0 will have a deeper impact on the world of work. Virtual meetings via advanced VR and holograms will be much better than the current videoconferences, and I don’t think we’ll have to wait until the end of the decade for these virtual meetings to become quite common. Videoconferencing has saved us during the pandemic, but as a technology, it leaves a lot to desire and it has still a lot of room for improvement. Virtual and Augmented reality is probably the next phase of it.

Decentralised organisations via DAOs and similar governance models will coexist with the traditional centralised corporations we are used to living with.

We are living through a paradigm shift also in the way we organise our work. Remote, hybrid, and distributed working models are here to stay and we are seeing the organisations of the future taking shape in front of our eyes. I suspect these changes will accelerate in the next few years and, by the end of the decade, the organisational landscape and the way we work will have transformed in such a way to be almost unrecognisable from the ones we had just a few years ago.

So, roaring or whimpering twenties?

Human beings (and journalists in particular) like to find parallelisms with other times and places. We seek comfort in the known and the familiar, so it is always easy to fall back on the past when trying to predict what will happen in the future. So, will the 2020s be again the Roaring 20’s as they were a hundred years ago?

It’s easy to see similarities and to think this will again be a decade of growth, and a crazy economic, technological, social, and cultural boom. The thing is, each decade is different and it has its own peculiarities. There will be some similarities with the 1920s, but also stark differences.

The 2020s will be convulsive and disruptive. We will see many changes to our society happening very quickly, but this has been the main trend for the last few decades already. As Heraclitus said, more than two millennia ago, “the only constant is change”.

The 2020s will be convulsive and disruptive. We will see many changes to our society happening very quickly, but this has been the main trend for the last few decades already. As Heraclitus said, more than two millennia ago, “the only constant is change”.

All changes and disruptions can be uncomfortable for those who have to live through them, and they have the potential to harm many people. They also open doors to new worlds full of opportunities and excitement.

Some food for Hope

As people like Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now) and Hans Rosling (Factfulness) have argued, despite all the problems we still undeniable have, the world is a better place today than a hundred years ago, and it is improving all the time. Things are getting better, not worse, and this will continue to be so also in the future. That’s a good hope to have, but hope is a double-edged sword and isn’t always justified.

We build our future in the present. We build our tomorrow today. We are the ones building it, nobody else. The 2020s will be as we make them be, but as a society, we have the right tools to make it a fantastic decade and to finish it off better than how we started it (which isn’t that hard if you think we kicked it off with a global pandemic). The 2020s will have a bit of roaring, and a bit of whimpering, and they will be unique and special in their own way.

Let’s talk again in 2030 and see how it went, shall we?

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“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”

Mark Twain

 “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”

George Santayana

Futurists need to be good historians. In order to predict the future, it helps to understand the past, as it often repeats itself, or at least it rhymes, as Twain told us. As they often say, what is about to happen has probably happened in another place and time, only with different protagonists. 

Technology is bringing many changes to our world, and we may think we have entered a time like no other in the past. This may be true, but there are plenty of things we can still learn about our future by looking at our past. 

Take automation, for example. We may think our current concerns about robots taking our jobs are modern, but as we will see, people have been worrying about machines stealing their jobs at least since the 16th century, if not earlier. Does this mean this time can’t be different? No, of course it can be, and it probably is, but understanding what happened in the past will allow us to understand ourselves better and thus better prepare for the future.

From hunting to farming

Oxford Dictionary defines work as an “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result”.

If we take this definition, we human beings have worked from the beginnings of time, even before we were Homo Sapiens. We have always had to hunt, collect berries and fruits, create tools, and make clothes. 

Contrary to what is commonly believed today, prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes didn’t live at the edge of starvation and didn’t have to work hard to satisfy their needs. They would at most work 15 hours per week and they dedicated most of their time to leisure and rest. They were in most cases better fed and healthier than their farmer descendants. 

The sense of work as duty taking most of our time and worries started with farming societies in the Neolithic revolution. When people started having sedentary lives and having to sow the land to reap its fruits, they began to tend to this land every day or almost every day. 

With the surplus of food and production, social status and hierarchies came into being, and specialized professions such as priests, accountants, lawyers, and doctors were created. Food production and goods stopped being communal, and money replaced bartering as the primary exchange mechanism.

With farming, the concept of work as we more or less understand it today was created.

From the Classical World to the Industrial Era

As the first agrarian cities evolved into empires like Egypt, Sumer, or Assyria, complex bureaucracies arose with increasingly specialized jobs. In Classic Greece and Rome, a big part of the work was carried out by slaves. Philosophers like Plato or Aristotle thought that slaves should carry out work so the elite, the free citizens, could dedicate their efforts to occupations of the mind such as philosophy, arts, and politics. This remit of the high mind is what gave them real humanity. In that sense, slaves, and therefore workers, were not fully human. Even professions like tradespeople and merchants weren’t fully respected.

With the arrival of the Middle Ages in Europe, slavery was replaced by servitude under the feudalist system. There existed freer people like artisans and craftsmen, who generally lived in towns and organized themselves in guilds, but most lived and worked in the fields for their feudal lords. 

Politics and culture have changed a lot since the farming revolution that transformed our ancestors from hunter-gatherers into farmers, but the world of work didn’t change so much. Most people worked on the fields, from dawn to dusk, during millennia. The farming revolution made our societies richer as a whole, but most of the people living in those societies weren’t healthier or happier than their hunter forebears.

Yuval Harari writes it beautifully in his bestselling work Sapiens:

“These forfeited food surpluses fueled politics, wars, art, and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments, and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists, and thinkers- who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

Yuval Noah Harari

This was more or less the state of affairs until the Industrial Revolution, or revolutions, in the plural, as there were more than one. 

The Industrial Revolutions

There have been three industrial revolutions, and we are now in the middle of the fourth one. The first one started in the 18th century in Great Britain and came about thanks to coal and steam power. Many processes and tasks that were hitherto made by hand were mechanized. Workers started getting together in factories, and many people migrated from farmlands to cities. Agriculture was no longer the main occupation of ninety percent of the working population, as more and more people started working in the industrial sector. 

Like in all revolutions, there were significant disruptions and upheavals. Due to the mechanization of work, many people lost their old jobs. The term “Luddite” as someone opposed to technological progress originated during this time, as the followers of the mythical Ned Ludd broke power looms as a form of protest for them losing their jobs due to the unstoppable progress of machines.

Trade unions were created at this time, first in the UK and then in other parts of Europe and the US. 

The second revolution happened at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and is associated with the combustion engine, electricity, the industrial use of gas and chemicals, and the assembly line as the leading industrial organisation method. Taylorism, the scientific management method, and paternalistic leadership originated during this time. Sadly, they are still in vogue in some companies.

The third industrial revolution happened in the second half of the 20th century and was characterized by the rise of the computer, electronics, and nuclear power. Lean Manufacturing, Just-In-Time, and other methodologies that originated in Japan were the must-haves in management. Some management gurus and enlightened companies realised that you could have more productive workers by treating them well and focusing on their development. Terms like employee engagement started to be used. Globalisation accelerated, and the world got smaller.

We are now in the 4th revolution. It started with the internet and mobile technologies, but more and more exponential technologies are coming to the fore and integrating with each other: artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, Internet of Things, 3D printing, genetic engineering, and a long etcetera. In terms of energy use, the central theme of the fourth industrial revolution is the search for sustainable sources of energy, with renewables taking the spotlight. 

All this is changing the way we organize work, and it will have an impact on the Future of Work that we are in the process of imagining and building. 

The Great Manure Crisis or the Parable of Horseshit

While we talk about the industrial revolutions, it is worthwhile to stop to relate a crisis that I find symbolic of the good and bad sides technological progress can bring. I am talking about the Great Manure Crisis, or what the journalist Elizabeth Kolter aptly called the Parable of Horseshit.

As explained by Susskind in his work A World without Work, the Great Manure Crisis disturbed the lives of the citizens of many American and European cities. Due to industrialization, cities in developed countries had grown enormously in the 19th century, and by the end of the century, the situation was unsustainable. Horses were still the primary means of transport, there were millions of them everywhere, and the amount of manure they produced was in the millions of tons per year.

This became a hygiene, salubrity, health, and esthetic crisis of great magnitude in cities the world over. City councils and governments didn’t know what to do with so much horseshit. Literally. Then technology came to the rescue, as it often happens.

The first internal combustion engine was created in the 1870s; in the 1880s, it was installed in the first automobile, and by the 1910s, Ford was producing the Model T en masse using its famous assembly lines. By 1912, there were more cars than horses in New York, and five years later, the last horse-drawn cart was decommissioned. Millions of horses were sacrificed as they could not compete with automobiles and trucks to transport goods and people.

The Parable of Horseshit is usually told as an optimistic tale, one of technological triumph. However, like the 1973 Economic Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief, others see this as a parable with more disturbing conclusions. A new technology, the combustion engine, had displaced in a matter of years an animal that for millennia had played a key role in our economic life. Leontief thought that what cars and tractors were to horses, computers, and robots would be to us, humans. 

Are we to have the same fate as horses?  

The threat of automation

Worries about the impact of automation on employment are not new. They have been around for centuries. An excellent example of it is when William Lee presented his project for a stocking frame knitting machine to Queen Elizabeth I in 1589, seeking her approval. Her response, however, wasn’t very positive:

“Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”

Queen Elizabeth I

Lee got a reprimanded and failed to obtain the queen’s approval, but at least he survived the incident. Others didn’t. Anton Moller invented the ribbon loom at the end of the 16th century in Danzig, Germany. This machine required no specific skill to use. The city council was afraid that many workers would lose their jobs and become beggars, so they destroyed the device and executed Moller by strangling him. Talk about creating a positive environment for innovation and inventions.  

Similar cases happened throughout Europe, including the episodes with the Luddites mentioned above. Machines weren’t welcomed warmly. Almost two centuries had to pass before machines became widespread in factories, first in the UK and then in the rest of Europe, thus starting the first industrial revolution.

Since then, technological anxiety hasn’t waned and has even increased. The worries about automation and machines stealing our jobs are as present today as they were in the past, if not more. 

These fears have been unfounded in the past, as technology has displaced some jobs but has created many others. However, this time it is really different, some experts argue, as artificial intelligence and robots are qualitatively different from previous industrial machinery and are displacing white-collar and blue-collar jobs alike.

Will the automation-doomers be right this time, or will we continue creating new jobs? Who knows… Time only will tell.

The nature of work

Perhaps if machines did all our work, that wouldn’t be too bad. We could dedicate our time to do other things we may enjoy more and let robots do all our tedious tasks. What is wrong with enjoying life without having to work? Isn’t that what many people dream of doing if they win the lottery?

The problem is that today work has many social connotations. People find a purpose in their work, and it is also a meaningful way to signal social status. Often the first thing we ask when we first meet a person is what they do for a living, meaning what work they do. Many people love their jobs and are passionate about them. Some studies show that people without work sometimes become aimless and apathetic and have more mental health problems than people with a job.

This wasn’t always like this, though. The idea of work as having a positive moral attribute, as something desirable and fulfilling that provides a purpose to life, is relatively recent. It is linked to Protestantism in the 16th century.

The Bible mentions work as something men and women had to suffer:

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:19

Thus God condemned human beings to work if they wanted to eat. The connotation here isn’t that work is something edifying, but an obligation God put on all Adam’s descendants for his and Eve’s downfall from His grace into the path of sin.

This was a standard view throughout history. We mentioned above how Plato, Aristotle, and all classic Romans and Greeks thought of work as better left to slaves, so free citizens could dedicate their time to occupations of the mind and the spirit.

Paradoxically, the arrival of artificial intelligence and robots may get us closer to our Greek and Roman ancestors than we think. Robots could become something akin to the slaves of the old and do all the menial tasks we don’t want to do and leave us to do creative and meaningful work we enjoy doing and are passionate about. 

Before we get to this techno-utopian vision though, much has to change in our society and the existing technology. We’d have to go through many social upheavals and disruptions. Will we ever get there? Time only will tell, again.

From time-based to task-based work

One final theme I would like to delve deeper into is the nature of time and its relationship with work. As Marina Gorbis argues here, throughout history, human beings have organised their work and even their time around tasks, not the other way around. Clocks and watches weren’t an important part of our lives until recently. Their predominance only started with industrialisation, when it was necessary to gather all the factory workers at the same time and place and work on shifts of exact timing and duration. 

Before that, people didn’t worry so much about time. This continues in many farming societies in the developing world, where they still measure their time on the tasks of the day: eg. the time it takes you to cook rice, the time it takes you to travel the distance on the boat to the fishing area, etc. The seasons of the year marked the farmer’s needs, who would organise their work based on those needs. This also gave people much more autonomy and flexibility.

Even medieval and pre-modern artisans and craftsmen had more autonomy and organised their work around tasks, not time. They usually worked at their own home and their own pace, depending on the number of orders and the pieces they had to work on. Many people believe working from home is an entirely new thing, but for most of history, our forebears have mainly worked from home, both as farmers and artisans.

All this changed with the arrival of the factory and the office and the necessity to have everybody at the same place simultaneously. As Gorbis explains, this is changing again with the arrival of internet platforms and the uberisation of the economy: uber drivers are also paid per task and organise their work around tasks.

I would argue that this return to task-based work is not only seen in the internet platforms but can also be appreciated in programmers and other knowledge-based workers in the post-covid world, where more flexible working arrangements are becoming prevalent. Many companies are now encouraging or allowing their employees to work from anywhere at any time. 

History is full of circles and repetitions, and it seems the swing is going again in the opposite direction towards more autonomy and task-based work. If managed correctly, this is a positive development for both workers and organisations.

Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology

I would like to finish this post with a quote I love from the recently passed biologist Edward O. Wilson:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Edward O. Wilson

Natural evolution is slow, so our basic biology hasn’t changed much, and we still have the same software we had 100,000 years ago when we were hunting wild animals and collecting berries in small tribes. 

Social evolution isn’t as slow, so we have evolved our social norms and institutions as the centuries have ticked along. Some of our institutions are really medieval or pre-modern, but others have changed and evolved with time. I have tried to cover here how the world of work and attitudes towards it have changed throughout history. They have changed a lot.

The problem, and the crux of Wilson’s quote, is that technology is changing much faster than our biology and our cultural norms and institutions. It is changing too fast, and we cannot adapt fast enough. 

That’s why it is essential to understand our history and our past to adapt faster and build the future we want to build. History tends to repeat itself, or at least rhyme, so if we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we need to understand well what happened. 

Even if technology is moving faster than ever and we are in the exponential age, history can teach us important lessons and help us prepare for an uncertain future. Therefore, it is necessary to look back before we look forward. We need to understand the past of work to build a better and more humane Future of Work.

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The Future of Work will not happen in a vacuum; it will happen in a political, social, and economic environment. The geopolitics of the future will have an enormous impact on all our lives, so it is a topic worth studying.

In the post entitled What will the world be like in 2100? I hinted at the creation of a new world order, with globalisation continuing its march towards more integration, although with its ups and downs, and two superpowers, China and the US, dominating the world scene. 

Is this forecast correct? Nobody knows yet, but it does seem likely.

In this post, we will focus mainly on the rivalry between China and the US.

Avoiding the Thucydides trap

The Thucydides trap establishes that there is a tendency towards war when one superpower is declining and another one is rising.

War seems to be almost inevitable in those cases.

The term is modern and is mainly used to refer to the US and China, but it is based on the commentary of the historian and general Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars, when the established hegemon, Sparta, and the rising power, Athens, clashed in several wars. 

It is a process that we have seen happen many times in history after that, for example, between the same Greeks/Macedonians and Persians, Greeks and Romans, Romans and Germanic peoples, the Mongols and the Chinese, the Japanese and the Chinese, all the innumerable wars between European powers from the Middle Ages to the Second World War, and a long list of other conflicts in history.

The rise of China in the last decades is undeniable. The progress their society has seen in a generation is astonishing, raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and becoming one of the most modern and digitally savvy countries in the world. China has become an economic and technological powerhouse that might pass the US in real GDP terms in the 2030s. 

The US still has the most powerful army in the world, but for how long? As the power of the US wanes and that of China rises, is war inevitable, or can we escape the Thucydides Trap? 

A two-horse race?

A war between the two world superpowers would be disastrous for them and the rest of the world, as the world economies are more interconnected than ever.

Still, it is not entirely out of the question. A top US admiral warned that China could invade Taiwan before 2027. This could be the catalyst of a war between the two giants.  

Taiwan isn’t officially an American ally, as the US has been committed to the One China policy since the ’70s. Still, in practice, they have supported Taiwan by selling weapons and providing them with military support for decades. 

As The Economist argues, if China attacked Taiwan and America didn’t go to their aid, all the American allies in Asia (Japan, South Korea, and all the rest) would realise that the US was no longer able to guarantee their safety. The Pax Americana would crumble, causing the end of the world order as we know it.

The US still has the mightiest and the most technologically advanced army in the world, but it is not clear they would win a war in China’s backyard.

The result would be uncertain, so it would be a risky move. Nobody in the Chinese or US government wants a war against the other power, but this alone hasn’t avoided wars in the past. Often wars that nobody wants end up happening anyway. 

The US and Western powers feel that China has been increasingly assertive in its foreign policy, and Xi Jinping is leaning towards a more authoritarian grip on the country internally. On the other hand, China feels its deserved rise into world power is being curtailed by a paranoid and declining power like the US.

It is Thucydides’ trap once again.

The consequence is an escalation of disputes between both countries via a trade war, sanctions on each other, the limitations against Huawei, etc. The last two years of the Trump administration saw a rise in this escalation, which Biden is bent on continuing, but with the support of the Western allies Trump so much spurned.

The world is watching nervously while the two superpowers escalate and harden their stances, but for the sake of all of us, let us hope we don’t end up in Cold War II.

It would be catastrophic. There are many global challenges we need to face as a species. After all, we are all people, and we all have the same problems: global warming, the risk of nuclear annihilation, technological disruption… to name just a few.

AI supremacy

Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence is the future. I would argue that it is already the present, as it impacts almost everything we do, and it is upending numerous industries.

In his book about China, the US, and AI entitled AI Super-Powers, Kai-Fu Lee argues that China has all the elements to dominate the AI world in the future and thus become the leading global super-power. 

He argues that the US dominated the initial stage of AI innovation, as it attracts the main researchers in the field, but China will dominate the phase that we are now entering, the phase of implementation. Creating an AI super-power in this era requires four main building blocks: abundant and quality data, the right kind of entrepreneurs, well-trained AI scientists, and a supportive policy environment.

Lee believes China has an advantage in most of these.

To begin with, China has more mobile and internet users than the US and Europe combined, which gives Chinese companies an advantage in the quantity of data they manage and analyse.

Not only that. In China, the digital world combines with the real world for everyday online and offline services, so the quality of the data these companies have about their consumers’ behaviours is much richer than that of their Silicon Valley peers, which consists mainly of the number of likes, follows, and thumbs-up.

Thus, China edges the US in both the quantity and quality of its data.

Lee also argues that Chinese entrepreneurs are like gladiators hardened in the cut-throat arena of the hypercompetitive Chinese market. Western entrepreneurs seem to be more gentlemanly and are not used to the methods and toughness of the China market. This is another point in their favour.

Regarding AI scientists, this is where the US still has the edge over China, especially in the quality of top researchers. However, Lee believes that the main breakthroughs in the AI and Machine Learning fields have already been achieved. In the implementation era, the quantity of solid engineers will be more important than the quality of elite researchers. Here China wins once again.

Last but definitely not least, the Chinese government has focused all its efforts on promoting and enabling the development of AI industries.

Westerners can complain as much as they want about the authoritarian inclinations of the Chinese Communist Party, but it is undeniable that when they put their minds to achieving something, they get the right amount of focus and resource allocation at all levels of government. The vast investments and facilities given to AI companies are a clear example of this.

Kai-Fu Lee cites a study from PwC, that estimates that AI deployment will add $ 15.5 trillion to global GDP by 2030, of which China would get $7 trillion, almost double the US take of “only” $3.7 trillion. 

Proponents of capitalist liberal democracies based on a market economy traditionally argued that their model was the best to allocate resources and promote innovation, as innovation cannot be centrally planned or fostered. China is not centrally innovating, but it has created the right incentives and environment to create an economy where innovation is fostered and encouraged. 

AI is one of the most significant technological innovations of the last few decades, with an impact everywhere, from new business models to military strategy and intelligent weapons.

If one power gets AI supremacy over all the rest, it may well end up dominating the world. 

Geopolitics money: Petrodollar vs. e-Yuan

Since the Bretton Woods conference just after the Second World War, the US Dollar has been the world currency reserve.

First, it was backed by gold, but by the late 60s, the US Government could not maintain this backing due to the escalating costs of the Vietnam war and the social reforms of the time. In 1971 the Nixon administration decided to dismantle the Bretton Woods standard and stop the gold backing of the USD.

A couple of years later, the US government made a deal with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf powers, establishing that they would sell oil products denominated only in dollars and buy US Treasuries and bonds. In return, the US would provide military protection and sell them weapons. All countries needed to have US dollars in their reserves to buy oil.

Thus it was created the petrodollar system that made the US dollar the de facto global currency.

Being the global currency brings some advantages to the US Government, not only economic but also geopolitical.

The US Government can print all the money they want, and the cost will be transferred to all citizens of the world, not only to their own. They can also sanction other countries and individuals and take them out of the SWIFT payment system altogether or freeze their assets in allied banking systems. They have been using the dollar as a political weapon with increased frequency in the last few years, which irks its rivals and pushes them to look for alternatives.

The EU tried to rival the USD with the creation of the Euro, but it wasn’t a match. Even if it became the second most used currency in the world from inception, more than 80% of global trade is still carried out in USD. 

Saddam Hussein didn’t want to sell Iraqi oil in “the currency of the enemy,” so he announced they would be selling it in Euro denominations in 2000. Some people believe that the actual cause of the Iraq War was not to find WMDs or to fight Islamic terrorism but to bring the considerable Iraqi oil reserves back to the petrodollar system and set an example for the rest of the oil-exporting countries so none of them thought about leaving the dollar system again.

China doesn’t like or want to rely on the US Dollar either, so they are trying to uplift their currency, the yuan, from another angle. They are one of the first countries in the world to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a centralized cryptocurrency owned and managed by the Chinese Central Bank. 

Couple the digital e-yuan with their Belt and Road Initiative, whereby they are investing massive amounts of money in infrastructure projects around the ancient silk road, and their bet for an increasing number of countries in their vicinity to conduct more trade in the new e-yuan is clear.

This will give them, as the global USD does to the US, more economic and political clout.

The others

There are currently around 200 countries in the world, but when talking about future geopolitics, we have only spoken about the US and China so far. What happens with all the others? Aren’t they important?

Of course, they are.

Billions of people live there, me included.

Many things will happen in India, Africa, Latin America, Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East…. Still, everything will circle around what happens between China and the US, be it a Cold War, a Trade War, or just some gentle discrepancies. For the sake of all of us, let’s hope it is the last one.

Whichever it is, the tensions and rivalry between China and the US will be the main geopolitical battle for the next years and decades. Let’s keep an eye on it. 

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