– steam – integrated into the productive process.
In the fifty years that followed the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a true revolution in work had occurred. The emergence of an engineering class signalled the professionalisation of practical science and the institutional pursuit of innovation. This also saw the transformation of the working lives of people across Britain and later the developed world. Work became more regimented, more specialised. The workplace and the work schedule became more compartmentalised and hierarchical.
This was the embryonic stage of Fordism – the rise of the engineer as the organiser of economic activity, and the decline of the artisan. The layout of a factory was as important as the technology within it, embodying as it did the power structure of the organisation. In this second Industrial Revolution, engineers redesigned factories to make employees fit into the production line. By doing so workers lost their autonomy, becoming simply as interchangeable as the parts they created.
As we look to the world of work we now inhabit, and the decades to come, what we are seeing is the potential reverse of this trend, from hierarchy and interchangeable, general skills to the reinstatement of horizontal collaboration and more specialised mastery.
What is clear is that the current scale of transformation is as great as any witnessed in the past. Again it is powered by an energy transformation (in this case computing power); again going through periods of slower and then more rapid change; and again depending on a new set of skills and an emerging class of skilled people.4
However, as we shall see, this time the impact of the Industrial Revolution is global rather than local, the speed ever more accelerated and the disconnect with the past likely to be as great. It is clear that our world is at the apex of an enormously creative and innovative shift that will result in profound changes to the everyday lives of people across the world.
Patching together the future
Faced with the magnitude of these changes, how do we both make sense of them, and indeed ensure that we and those we care about are able to do the very best they can over the coming decades? I’ve used the story of my mother’s quilt-making as a metaphor for the task that we are all faced with as we prepare for the future. As I attempt to make sense of the future for myself – in a sense to stitch together the pieces that are important to me – I cannot help but be occasionally overwhelmed with the sheer complexity of this endeavour, very much as I suspect my mother must have felt at the beginning of her craft. I wonder if indeed it is worthwhile to try and make any predictions about our working life in 2020, 2025 or beyond, as far out as 2050? However, what has spurred me on is that, the more I have learnt, the more I have come to believe that while this endeavour is indeed complex it is also incredibly worthwhile. It is worthwhile because you and I, and those whom we care about, need some sort of realistic picture of what the future might bring in order to make choices and sound decisions.
Think about it this way: I am now 55 and could expect to live to my mid-eighties – perhaps even into my mid-nineties. My two sons are currently aged 16 and 19 and they could well live more than a century. If I work into my seventies, then that’s 2025, and if my sons do the same they will be working into 2060. Take a moment now to make the same time period calculations for yourself and others who are important to you.
Of course, all the decisions about your working life don’t need to be made now. In the case of my children, for example, I expect they will adapt and change and morph over the next 50 years – just as I have done through my own working career. However, wouldn’t it be useful to have some picture of the future, storylines of future lives, scenarios of choice to guide and give inspiration? We need these, not only for our personal or local near-term futures, but also for remoter global futures.
Just because my children, you and I ‘need’ realistic pictures of the future, it does not mean of course that we can have them. Predictions about future technical and social developments are notoriously unreliable – to an extent that has led some to propose that we do away altogether with prediction in our planning and preparation for the future. Yet, while the methodological problems of such forecasting are certainly very significant, I believe that doing away with prediction altogether is misguided.5
The reason it is so important now at least to attempt to paint a realistic picture of the future is that we can no longer imagine the future simply by extrapolating from the past. I cannot imagine my future working life by drawing a direct line with the working life of my father – any more than I could expect my sons to predict their working lives from mine. I am not suggesting that everything will shift. Of course some aspects of work will remain the same; one of the challenges, in fact, is actually knowing what will remain stable. As the science fiction writer William Gibson famously remarked, ‘the future is here – just unevenly distributed’.6
It has not always been so difficult to simply extrapolate from the past. For much of the ages of mankind, perceptions of daily lives were envisaged – with very few exceptions – as changeless in their material, technological, and economic conditions. This transformed fundamentally from the eighteenth century with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when what was seen as hitherto untamable forces of nature could be controlled through the appliance of science and rationality.7
The past six generations have amounted to the most rapid and profound change mankind has experienced in its 5,000 years of recorded history.8 If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as in the last half-century, then by the time my children are the same age as me – in 2050 – the world will be seven times richer than it is today, world population could be over 9 billion, and average wealth would also increase dramatically.9
What is important about my sons’ questions about their future work is that they are living in an age in which they face a schism with the past of the same magnitude as that previously seen in the late nineteenth century. The drivers of that change were the development of coal and steam power. This time round the change is not the result of a single force, but rather the subtle combination of five forces – the needs of a low-carbon economy, rapid advances in technology, increasing globalisation, profound changes in longevity and demography, and important societal changes that together will fundamentally transform much of what we take for granted about work.
It is not just our day-to-day working conditions and habits that will change so dramatically. What will also change is our working consciousness, just as the industrial age changed the working consciousness of our predecessors. The Industrial Revolution brought a mass market for goods, and with it a rewiring of the human brain towards an increasing desire for consumption, and the acquisition of wealth and property. The question we face now is how the working consciousness of current and future workers will be further transformed in the age of technology and globalisation we are entering.
What is inevitable is that, for younger people, their work will change perhaps unrecognisably – and those of us already in the workforce will be employed in ways we can hardly imagine. This new wave of change will, like those that have gone before them, build on what has been accomplished in the past, made up of a gradual process with some possibly unpredictable major waves. It is about increasing globalisation, industry and technology. But, as in the past, these changes will also bring something that is qualitatively different – new industries based around renewable energy sources, new developments of the internet, and indeed new ways to think about work.10
The reality is that predicting the future is a matter of degree, and different aspects of the future of work can be predicted with varying degrees of reliability and precision. For example, I can predict with some accuracy that computers will become faster, materials will become stronger and medicine will cure more diseases so that we will live longer. Other aspects of the future, such as migration flows, global temperatures and government policy, are much less predictable. It’s more