My grandson will inherit the future.
I keep searching for out-of-the-box thinkers who are addressing what I believe is a looming catastrophe around the future of work as we know it. Here’s my response to a recent discussion of the issue by Yi-huah Jiang, the former premier of the Republic of China, Taiwan and currently a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Who am I to question someone with such sterling credentials? Well, somebody has to do it. I can’t see sitting around and waiting for Armageddon.
https://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-what-politicians-should-know
I applaud the courage shown by Dr. YI-HUAH JIANG in addressing the Future of Work. 
However I’m afraid his approach does not go far enough in challenging underlying cultural assumptions about the role of work and employment in a world that anticipates ubiquitous automation and AI.
“The combination of business commitment and social ideal attracts many young people. Its challenge lies in the ambiguity of its positioning and the lack of necessary game rules.”
This is more than a game. The very fabric of industrialized society is woven from merit derived from work and the specific reciprocity of market economics. At present we have no mechanisms for distribution of the wealth we are capable of producing outside of a monetary system and we are seeing a rapid rise in populations with little access to money. If we continue to focus our thinking on business, jobs and work as we have known them, I fear we are failing to notice that the proverbial train has already left the station.
“Will job opportunities become better or worse with the advance of an innovation-driven economy and freelancing?”
Worse. Freelancers do not have jobs in the sense of employment. They have gigs — short-term and highly competitive, punctuated by increasing periods of searching for new clients during which they have ongoing expenses but no income. Today I spoke with the Executive Director of an organization that deploys resources for disaster recovery. He mentioned that he has a surfeit of volunteers and not enough money. Those highly-skilled volunteers come from the ranks of the underemployed. The money is sitting in the hands of the very wealthy who cannot consume enough to keep our current economic engine running and, correctly, don’t believe philanthropy is an adequate vehicle to solve the world’s distribution problems. We’ve got to think outside the box of paid work.
“Not everyone can adapt to jobs that demand a higher level of technology knowhow.”
You said it. Human beings evolved first as hunter-gatherers and then farmers.
Even craftspeople, artisans and traders can begin their practice around age 12 and become experts by their 20s. Actually, it’s not “technology” (which means “knowhow”) that is the problem because there is knowhow associated with every occupation. It’s the high levels of creative innovation and intellectual problem solving to which “average” minds have difficulty adapting. Most of us are creatures of repetition and habit. With robots and artificial intelligence programs doing the routine work, only the exceptional humans are employable. What does this mean for the masses in a world where self-esteem is intimately connected with having a job?
“The crisis of mid-career unemployment will therefore grow, and can be only temporarily alleviated by a decrease in population due to the global trend of falling birth rates, especially among advanced economies.”
Uh huh.
“To face a changing world of work, all the components of a society need to prepare, be it family, school, corporation, labor union, or social enterprise.”
To face a changing world, perhaps all these components need to find meaning in human activity that goes beyond “work” as we define today. In medieval times large quantities of society’s wealth went into building cathedrals, conspicuous consumption by royals and nobles and waging local wars. We’re already recreating the wars. Is Burning Man the new cathedral?
“The government should take the initiative to envision reasonable working conditions.”
No. Governments need to envision and support new ways of distributing real wealth before the masses, in their frustration over being kept from that wealth, revolt and tear down their governments with no idea what to put in their place.
