A new survey asks children what work will look like in 2040. Even asking the question tells us more about today than it does about tomorrow, says Jason Walsh
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What will the world of work look like in 2040? According to a new survey, children today expect to work with robots, not have to bother with commutes, and will enjoy the death of e-mail. They expect flexibility. They expect four-day weeks. They may get fewer.
The findingd from the poll of 11- to 17-year-olds and their parents are dramatic: 86% expect their working lives to be ‘transformed’, 88% expect to work regularly with AI and robots, and just 29% expect to commute more than 30 minutes.
The kiddos also expected 3D virtual meetings (38%), gaming areas (38%), sleeping pods (31%), personalised temperature and light settings (28%) and augmented reality meeting rooms (25%), presumably not yet well-read enough to understand they were describing hell.
But gee whizz!
None expected P45s, as far as I could tell. Reading it, the walls started to sweat. It was conducted by some entity called Beano Brain. That can’t be right. Need to breathe. What does this mean, I wondered, any of it? I felt dizzy. Yes, work will change: I’ve seen it change myself, and the evidence is there for anyone who cares to look.
What it really meant, though, was the exhaustion of futurism. Perhaps I should welcome it, as futurism always was a nuisance. Every generation is told they’ll revolutionise the workplace. Generation X was told this. Millennials were told this. Now Alpha. The predictions are always the same: less commuting, more technology, more flexibility, more balance. But even if it is true (and it’s more complicated than that) each of those words can be read both ways.
Demographics don’t matter
And, by the way, the generations don’t exist. I was told I was a member of ‘Generation Y’, which was later retooled as Millennial, but gave me the boot. It’s all meaningless. Ireland had no post-war baby boom. Any apparent meaning derived from these zombie categories is actually located somewhere else. Class, education, sheer bloody weight of numbers? Something. Power, always power.
I was wondering about so-called Generation Alpha, though. I remember being 11, but I don’t remember anyone asking me anything about work, other than what I’d like to do when I grew up. Since when do we ask 11-year-olds to design the economy? What does it mean that businesses now market to children as future workers, shaping their expectations before they’ve had even their first jobs? Why can’t we differentiate between education and training anymore? And why do business owners cry like babies when their workforce has not received job training at universities, institutions that were not originally intended to train anyone in anything?
The thing is, this study was conducted for IWG. Formerly, Regus, it lets furnished offices to businesses and freelancers. It is basically WeWork, only not insane. And that’s a lot, actually. There’s actually nothing wrong with what IWG does. I’ve considered renting an office from them myself. A perfectly boring, perfectly respectable business selling something some people need.
E-mail will not die, it will just get worse. The paperless office never arrived, and it never will. And even if it did, all we would be doing is creating simulacra of it. Right now, as I type these words, I am staring at a fake page, in a fake word processor, that is in a thing called a ‘site’ that has no spatial reality and I access through a ‘browser’ better conceptualised as a leaky firehose. Robots have been around for decades and people don’t notice them because they aren’t friendly butlers, nor maniacs, like in the movies. They just replaced jobs.
Anyone can predict the future. Here’s mine: the future of work is in the gap. Not a void, not an abyss, a banal gap between reality and fantasy. The gap between what children are being told to expect – flexibility, robots, no commute, four-day weeks – and what they’ll actually get: fake self-employment, precarity, HR displacing unions, barely functional and un-interoperable technology, and therapy to make you accept awful reality, computers spying on you to management. Bleak? Perhaps. But science fiction was never really speaking about tomorrow, was it? Nor were mystics, seers and fortune tellers, the mad, the bad and the sad, and nor are methodologically dubious surveys. We’re all talking about now.