Our lives should not be defined by work - or work itself should be transformed. 12 short stories to help us get there

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As top-down politics in the U.K. begins to recognise that pushing back the frontiers of working time might help a bottom-up flourishing of community and self-determination, the policy centres are turning to story-telling as a way to make our future work (or post-work) options concrete.

RSA’s Four Futures of Work

We have covered the RSA’s visioning exercise on work before - and they have now produced a PDF of short stories, “Four Futures: Love, Labour, and Language in 2035”, illustrating each of their scenarios. We map the authors and their stories to each one below:

The Big Tech Economy describes a world where most technologies develop at a rapid pace, from self-driving cars to 3D printing.

  • Darren McGarvey’s “Payment Not Accepted”

The Precision Economy portrays a future of hyper-surveillance and algorithmic optimisation.

  • Stephen Armstrong’s “The Joy Hive”

The Exodus Economy is characterised by an economic slowdown.

  • Preti Taneja‘s “Click Submit”

The Empathy Economy envisages a future of responsible stewardship.

  • Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s “Henri’s Story”

The full PDF for all these stories is here.

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Wired magazine’s US edition occasionally runs a themed issue of SF short stories - this one is about the future of work, and their thematic is below:

In the early 21st century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction … [It shapes] how people understand the most important technological, social, and economic developments of our time.” —Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Half of being human, give or take, is the work we do. Pick up a shift. Care for the sick. Fix the plumbing. Audition for a part. Sometimes it’s all we think about—and fret about, especially as technology comes for our jobs. Just search “future of” and autocomplete does the rest: Do you mean “future of work”? Freaking Google, surfacing our collective anxieties yet again.

“Economists and organizational behaviorists and McKinsey consultants crunch the numbers and tell us, with great surety, how we’ll spend our days. The careers and callings of tomorrow will inevitably be this, certainly not that, and look at all the superefficient self-guided factory robots! While the nature of work is always changing, the AI revolution has intensified the pace and magnitude of these predictions, painting a future that seems to need our labor less and less.

“But charts and white papers only capture so much. Facts need feelings, and for that we turn to science fiction. Its authors are our most humane, necessary futurists, imagining not just what the future holds but how it might look, feel, even smell. In the following pages are stories from eight sci-fi specialists. Some are set in the near term; others, a bit farther out. All remind us that, no matter the inevitable upheavals, we don’t struggle alone—but with and for other people. And robots.”

4TH SECTOR, ARTISTS, FUTURESpat kaneComment