When we speak about the future of work we often do this: we assume that there will be a labor market much like today, and that there will be jobs like the ones we have today, but that they will just be different jobs. It is as if we think we are moving from wanting bakers to wanting more doctors, and well, what should the bakers do? It is really hard to become a doctor!
There are other possible perspectives, however. One is to ask how both the market and the jobs will change under a new technological paradigm.
First, the markets should become much faster at detecting new tasks and the skills needed to perform them. Pattern scans across labor information markets make it possible to construct a kind of “skills radar” that will allow for us to tailor and offer new skills much like you are recommended new movies when you use Netflix. Not just “Others with your title are studying this” but also “Others on a dynamic career trajectory are looking into this”. We should be able to build skill forecasts that are a lot like weather forecasts, and less like climate forecasts.
Second, we should be able to distinguish surface skills and deep skills — by mining data about labor markets we should be able to understand what general cognitive skills underpin the surface skills that we need to deal with what changes faster. Work has layers – using Excel is a surface skill, being able to abstract a problem into a lattice of mental models is a deep skill. Today we assume a lot about these deep skills – that they have to do with problem solving and mental models, for example, but we do not know yet.
Now, if we turn to look at the jobs themselves. A few things suggest themselves.
First, jobs today are bundles of tasks – and social status and insurance and so on. These bundles are wholly put together by a single employer who will guesstimate what kinds of skills they need and then hire for those assumed skills. This is not the only possible way to bundle tasks. You could imagine using ML to ask what skills are missing across the organisation and generate new jobs on the basis of those skills; there may well be hidden jobs – unexpected bundle of skills – that would improve your organisation immeasurably!
Second, the cost of assessing and bundling tasks is polarised. It is either wholly put on the employer, or – in the gig economy – on the individual worker. This seems arbitrary. Why shouldn’t we allow for new kinds of jobs that bundle tasks from Uber, Lyft and others and adds on a set of insurances to create a job? A platform solution for jobs would essentially allow you to generate jobs out of available tasks – and perhaps even do so dynamically so that you can achieve greater stability of the flow of tasks, and hence more economic value out of the bundle than the individual tasks. This latter point is key to building in social benefits and insurance solutions into the new “job”.
Third, it will be important to follow the evolution of centaur jobs. These may just be jobs where you look for someone who is really good at working with one set of neural networks or machine learning systems of a certain kind. These will, over time, become so complex as to almost exhibit “personalities” of different kinds – and you may temperamentally or otherwise be a better fit for some of these systems than others. It is also not impossible that AI/ML systems follow the individual to a certain degree – that you offer the labor market you centaur joint labor.
Fourth, jobs may be collective and collaborative and you could hire for collective skills that today you need to combine yourselves. As coordination costs sink you can suddenly build new kinds of “macro jobs” that need to be performed by several individuals AND systems. The 1:1 relationship between an individual and a job may well dissolve.
The future of work short term lies in the new jobs we need on an existing market, long term we should look more into the changing nature of both those jobs and those markets to understand where we might want to move things. The way things are working now are also part of what was once an entirely new and novel way to think about things.