I can see several scenarios playing out but none of the Business As Usual scenarios seem to be very attractive from a social/societal point of view. I spent the autumn reading books in preparation of writing a report about "the future of work" in a research project about "scenarios and impacts of the future information society" and one important trend is indeed further rationalisation and automatisation (e.g. "robots/software/algorithms taking over/displacing human beings". It's hard for me not to see MOOCs as a way to rationalise and automate higher education (e.g. fewer job opportunities for university teachers in the future).

While there might be some truth in the claim that we need “a better educated workforce” - to create and/or compete for the “good jobs” in the global race between nations - there does on the other hand not seem to be enough "good", middle-class jobs for the global generation of (over-qualified?) university-educated 20- and 30-someones, for example "the lost generation" of 1.4 million young unemployed Spaniards, many with university degrees, or, the "ant tribe" of low income university graduates who settle for a poverty-level existence in the competitive Chinese job market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_tribe).

It is also true that for example Bill Gates believes that “people don't realize how many jobs will soon be replaced by software bots” (Bort 2014), i.e. by software automation/algorithms. This is a gospel that is repeated by other high-tech moguls, for example Google chairman Eric Schmidt (McFarland 2014, “The robots are coming for your job”) as well as by a slate of recent books;

- “Race against the machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2012).

- “The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014).

- “Jobocalypse: The end of human jobs and how robots will replace them” (Way 2013).

- “The lights in the tunnel: Automation, accelerating technology and the economy of the future (Ford 2009).

it seems logical that the path of least resistance will continue to move us towards a “winner-takes-it-all” society where, say, lawyers might or might not be paid well, but where the very best lawyers (doctors, university teachers, experts etc.) can charge astronomical fees. Such discussion harken back to the lively 1980’s discussions about the formation of a “two-thirds society” (in German: “Zweidrittelgesellschaft”) in the wake of the emerging information society, where a two thirds of the population continue to prosper while one third “fall behind” into a precarious existence of temporary jobs, unemployment and poverty. There is of course not guarantee that even two thirds will prosper (e.g. the squeeze on/disappearance of the middle class over the past few decades).

More radical schemes such as job-sharing or unconditional "basic income" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) could pacify emerging social divides and tensions (see for example the prescient work of André Gorz), but such a path currently seem like long-shots. There is no inherent reason for why we could not share the prosperity and the fruits of technological progress more widely, but that does currently not seem to be in the cards (e.g. the rich are instead getting getting richer and the distribution of income in industrialised societies is getting more uneven).

http://danielpargman.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-future-of-work.html

Thanks for that Dan. There are certainly many big questions [few certainties that there are]. One question concerns what is "best"?

Like in my attached video from the BBC link, Brynjolfsson and McAfee mention once certain knowledges are "brought" [or bought one may add] in existence, others become just "me too", hence literally redundant and "surplus". From whose point of view is that - to call a workforce "surplus" when they mean retrenchment?

You have people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all pushing for openness for production and circulation of largely FREE ideas. And yet, they maintain tight fists on their "own" ideas.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html

Take this dialogue and everything about ResearchGate. We depend on it. Why? I take it is sponsored by the Gates Foundation, too time pressed to check. Who can claim ownerships on these very utterances?

The more I have read about "work" and "the future of work", the more radical I personally become...

The primary question should in my mind be "how can we make society better?" rather than "how can we (e.g. the 1%) earn more money?".

However, I and other people in the academy are for the most part well off compared to the rest of the population. We belong to the "cadres", the "managers of society" that make the whole machinery work. The 1% couldn't get things to work with the cooperation of us and other professionals... This might be problematic too. Are we bought off?

Hi Daniel, thanks for your thoughts - too right about the radicalism.

I noted from your first posting: "here is no inherent reason for why we could not share the prosperity and the fruits of technological progress more widely, but that does currently not seem to be in the cards (e.g. the rich are instead getting getting richer and the distribution of income in industrialised societies is getting more uneven)."

And your second one just now: "The more I have read about "work" and "the future of work", the more radical I personally become... ".

To me, this might explain about the "star" status of Piketty. At least, he could secure his own future of some sort - by re-inventing Marx.

I would say to answer my own question about being the best means be able to appropriate, that's where value is in the economy of intellectual capital. So Piketty had appropriated Marx. Good for him, because it has secured his celebrity status.

You and some other people in the academy are so far okay. But lets admit, who do you really know who can feel they can "rest easy". Everyone's on the treadmill, increasingly 24/7, 365. Because everyone needs to be the "star" to survive in such a system. Perhaps this explain our celebrity obsessed culture.

Spare a thought for others who are the anonymous "adjunct" / casual economy. These include a whole lot of academics. Should I be ever senior enough, I suppose I might end up among these ranks. Right now, I am "proto-adjunct". :-)

As for intellectual exploitation [lets be honest about that], it goes far and deep. This thing about privatising ideas from seemingly common, and therefore public sources - that's really problematic, especially ethically and economically.

Starting traditional medicine as an example. Such knowledge has been passed down over thousands, if more, of years. The past didn't have the kinds of tools/ technologies that we have now - like nanotechnology and biotechnology. But accumulatively speaking, they have what we lack so desperately - time. And a system of collective, if not intergenerational, access to such knowledge.

Similarly with biomimicry, they started well as a good intention as protecting nature. But the whole point of the exercise, and hence why they get to go on TED, is to harness those several billion of years of evolution as intellectual capital.

So who owns such intelligence? Similarly with eco-systems. Right now, in Australia, you might have heard, if only because Leo DiCaprio has thankfully lent his royal mouth to the cause, we have this whole dredging business over the Great Barrier Reef - known as the biggest natural structure worldwide.

Think of that - what kinds of intelligence are in such rich but now sadly, stressed ecosystem? Hundreds of millions years in the making. All about to be sunk with mountains of dirt. How can we have such small numbers of capital owners assuming the right to destroy what has taken Nature so long to cultivate?

Similarly, I need to use the word "intelligence" to give the GBR some "rationale" to continuing being what it is. Why? This could be said of "our" natural heritages, from ancient rainforests to anything not seen, captured by our "private" technologies.

Sadly, this could be said of us. As long as we are useful to this system of exploitations, we deserve to continue being - all of us, from the most insignificant ant to anyone who hasn't "made" it, our reason to be is to make someone [hopefully ourselves] rich. Only big problem is that list of usefulness is becoming smaller with technological substitution.

But again, once materialist capital finished with destroying all the cultural, ethnic, linguistic, bio, ecological diversity, we would be an economy starved of ideas - which is what it feeds on in the first place.

And in all these diverse life forms and processes are where "new" ideas/ knowledge might have a chance to surface. But only too late. So we could not tap/ exploit the literal "wealth" where these ideas might find urgent applications. Take the famous Indian code-talkers as the means to circumvent the sophistication of the Enigma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

The Enigma decoding enterprise itself started the whole computer industry that we have now. But all those code-cracking was really only possible NOT because of the inadequacy of the mechanical device, but predictably, human weakness, namely the need for money.

Anyhow, I detracted, the main point is that about private ownership of ideas. Taking Steve Jobs' example with my above link for the famous glass staircase or even the Genius Bar. Steve Jobs didn't invent the staircase, so the equity rested in their claims for "ornamental design". At any given day, one could find such ingenuity on the web. So where's the difference?

From your observation: "here is no inherent reason for why we could not share the prosperity and the fruits of technological progress more widely, but that does currently not seem to be in the cards (e.g. the rich are instead getting getting richer and the distribution of income in industrialised societies is getting more uneven)."

So far, we've been somewhat "lucky" that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are such big philanthropists. If anything, it saves us the trouble on thinking how to solve the world's big problems whilst we are focusing on more important matters, like whether to buy that red designer X or white designer Y or blue designer Z hat/ shoes/ handbags... or manbag in your case. Meanwhile, Bill and Warren can decide those big issues for us.

Our big risk is actually to make any decision. Indecision saves us from jumping into the river where infested crocodiles await or the sharks infested sea [only metaphorically, I am afraid these days because our Western Australian government had taken care of that problem in the literal sense]. We stand on our ever shrinking sliver of land with the water level rising faster and faster.

Like the way Henry Ford paid his workers double the wage to buy his cars, this is what is happening about open "free" speech in social media spaces like this one [complement of Mr Gate - Why else is it called ResearchGate? :-)]. But what is the chattering based on?

As for your other observation Daniel: "More radical schemes such as job-sharing or unconditional "basic income" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) could pacify emerging social divides and tensions (see for example the prescient work of André Gorz), but such a path currently seem like long-shots."

This sounds to me more like busking. That's the original form of crowdsourcing. Partly that, and partly the hope that some talent scout happen to stumble by. Typical of the star system. How many buskers have you heard whom you thought they deserve a "break"? How many of our big celebrities lack talent? Only now, it's going to hit a big chunk of Marx's petit bourgeois.

Another difference is that busker of the old wouldn't need to worry about someone else sampling their singing and have that "repurposed" for monetary gain. Though this depends on what the busker is singing in the first place, namely an original song or not...

Basic in these real and digital worlds won't get you very far. Just as the "housewife" was relegated to unpaid labour in exchange for subsistence living, or similarly for the sharecropper with land rental for small yield, subjected to the seasons. We have similarly, but different variations of good old Marx.

Though for my "money", what little there off ;-), Piketty is probably right to bring back Marx. Or for that matter, someone should "re-invent" Keynes - fill the hole if only to create jobs. Though our solutions, typically, would need to be derivation-deviation rather than replication from the past. Because what lies ahead is certainly bound to be a rupture, though the common thread is Capital accumulation.

Wow, that was a long answer :-) Instead of answering point by point, let me contribute with interesting young Swedish sociologist Roland Paulson's concept of "empty work" ("empty labor"). I don't know if this to be seen as a strategy for "resistance" or just as individual laziness, but I find the concept very interesting!

Paulsen uses the example of seven persons were laid off from the Swedish Civil Aviation Authority in 2009 for having spent upwards to 75% of their working hours for private web surfing. Much public indignation was expressed over the fact that their web surfing in fact consisted of porn surfing, but less attention was paid to the more fundamental question of how it is possible for well-paid professionals to spend only two hours per day working and six hours per day doing other things without others (managers) noticing? According to several surveys, office workers spend an average of 1.5 to 3.5 hours per day performing empty work. Paulsen interviewed them as part of his ph.d. research and his conclusion is that unemployment or underemployment is a phenomenon that happens *within* as well as outside of wage labour. The six-hour workday already exists, although people might put in eight hours at the office every day.

With more specialized, technical (primarily white collar) job descriptions, it becomes difficult for a manager to have detailed knowledge of the practical tasks performed by his/her “underlings” - who oftentimes just sit in front of/interact with computers all day long. If that manager does not (for example) have up-to-date knowledge about current programming tools and practices (or indeed never has had relevant knowledge in the first place), he/she will not know what constitutes quality in the relevant context, what kind of equipment and programming environment (hardware and software) is necessary to solve the problem, what constitutes relevant objects/projects of comparison, what kinds of skills knowledge workers need to solve the problem, which conferences it would be beneficial to attend etc. It becomes exceedingly difficult for a manager to know if a specific task will take 200 hours or 2000 hours to perform - and the difference between these two estimates is equivalent to more than one man-year. In the early 21st century, we thus find ourselves in a situation where an increasing number of knowledge workers for a variety of reasons could have large control over the detailed contents of their work. It is in this context that “empty labour” happens, i.e. a situation where (office) workers are “going through the motions” or pretending to work while in reality doing everything but work (during long but not so gruelling working hours). If they have their own workspace and can close the door, they might watch movies or read books. If they work in an open office environment, they have to find other socially acceptable ways to waste time and perform non-work, for example by writing private e-mail, following e-mail distribution lists or online fora, aimless web surfing and other forms of “cyberslacking”.

We live in interesting times!? Do note that I have refrained from any moral indignation or normative recommendations as the purpose as the purpose here is just to point out the existence of this trend.

Love it, love it, Daniel!!! Do note I have not refrained from moral affirmation and normative agreement as the purpose here is just to "share" the "imaginations" of such trend. ;-) [Never trust an Australian to take anything too seriously?]

Regarding your posting: "In the early 21st century, we thus find ourselves in a situation where an increasing number of knowledge workers for a variety of reasons could have large control over the detailed contents of their work. It is in this context that “empty labour” happens, i.e. a situation where (office) workers are “going through the motions” or pretending to work while in reality doing everything but work (during long but not so gruelling working hours). If they have their own workspace and can close the door, they might watch movies or read books. If they work in an open office environment, they have to find other socially acceptable ways to waste time and perform non-work, for example by writing private e-mail, following e-mail distribution lists or online fora, aimless web surfing and other forms of “cyberslacking”."

I doubt that would go for much longer. Maybe alternative forms of escapism will be expressed.

The "empty labor/ work" I know very well back from my days in Hong Kong. The competition is about who can keep their seat warm the longest, preferably after the manager has gone. This really aggravated me as I had ferry timetables to follow. Miss one, then it's another 2 hours before I could get another. And such results because I needed to wait a couple more minutes longer for my manager to depart first.

At a Hong Kong university, this practise of practically living in the laboratories are a favourite past time among Chinese students, among which include the activity of slumber and gaming. By contrast, I knew some German post-docs who were mystified by such lack of division between work and rest. Being well-schooled in the art of efficiencies, they were offended and yet challenged by this need to keep one's seat warm.

Anyhow, with the advent of software to survey every move one makes on work's terminals, the tide has been turned towards the invisible manager who can get blow by blow what's happening - the perfect realisation of Foucault and Bentham's Panopticon.

Granted that the manager is now having a hard-time surpassing the technical expertise of their "team members". That's why I suppose why instead of being contractors or employees, the preference is to turn such members literally as the Steve Job's "$1" salary stockholder. So now we have the in-company busker who is "performance reviewed" constantly based on their capacity to attract crowds [consumers, believers, etc].

So no longer is the work quantified by "serving time" but rather "serving people and things". Hence the services, as opposed to labour. Just as labour "stopped working", got deregulated and sent to developing countries, largely China, so too will services be deregulated and outsourced, first to developing countries, but ultimately serviced by technology.

The question is then, what will happen to these services people? It's a big sector, composed of largely as professionals. But we have already the debasement of qualifications, like PhDs with limited job opportunities.

Traditionally one thinks security = doctors, accountants, and lawyers. If you wanted to make it in the entertainment industry, you'd better be prepared to face enormous insecurity. If the Second Machine Age, for example, is anything to go by, then that familiar feeling we associated about finding work in the entertainment arena is what it would be like with rule-based occupations.

So that's for me, the return to the busking economy - like what we are doing right now. Under such arrangement, one needs to "perform" to earn one's security. The currency is "fame" - to be known - the bigger the audience, the more secure one is - for a while at least. Take the promotional circuits that Steve Jobs has mastered, they're what "rock-stars" do. The rest of us aspire to that - not for just the sake of adulation, but literally survival.

It is a system where apart from the Moguls, everyone, including the stars, are on their feet - because their performance is only as good as the last. Besides, there's always someone waiting in the wings ready to take over. Only through the adulation of the crowd is one safe.

There are five main star systems, but I suspect "dull" occupations like Law, Medicine, and Accountancy - they are on their way towards some fully fledged star systems, especially Law. But the five that are well established include: Visual Arts, Motion Pictures, Music, Politics, and Higher Education.

As everyone pretty much knows, star systems are not meritocracies. They are classic cases of who you know rather than what you know, give or take, maybe less so for Higher Education [as long as access is open]. What is true though for all is about being at the right place, at the right time. Yet which place and time to be at, no-one can say with complete certainty.

So instead everybody needs to circulate their ideas and reputations, all freely. The relentless task of self-promotion, though hard work and probably going to keep increasing demands on our limited time, none of these efforts are renumerated. We've become scavengers, hunters and gatherers, labourers and manufacturers - all simultaneously.

Not for a minute though am I advocating a Marxist uprising. I know only too well the madness of such arrangements made in the name Marx, from Eastern Germany, China to Vietnam. I know first hand the purgatory destruction of communism inflicted on my family, rendering us enemies of the state, and ultimately, stateless people who have long ago surrendered our fate to chance.

However from Marx, what one could derive is some thinking on the configuration of labour, value, surplus, fetishes,alienation, exchange and use value for thinking [and hopefully preparing] for the next big wave of layoffs. I suspect Marx would give us the roadmaps for thinking about the rationalities of what happens when the knowledge worker is alienated from his knowledge? Or when knowledge commodified and encoded, what will we have on our hands with the totally diminished service sector?

In other words, when services are no longer serving, who will serve them?

If the obvious answer is no-one, there's going to be a lot "over-qualified" [debasement of education to the extent it is worthless] under-employed people - maybe even the very people who stopped believing in the social, "society", a long time ago.

Interesting comparison between Chinese and German sensibilities. Being a Swede, I'm very close to the German camp on this issue of "getting thing done and getting out of there" vs "warming the seat".

I'm not so sure about the invisible manager taking control. If you are more computer literate than your manager (and/or whoever is going to see and interpret the data), then you can whip something together that pretends to generate relevant keyboard keystrokes and soon thereafter anyone can download those programs from the internet... There was this great book published 40+ years ago, "The psychology of computer programming" that wrote some about programmers vs psychologists/managers. See this blog post of mine about it (and by all means follow the first two links too to understand the context better): http://danielpargman.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-fallible-nature-of-tests-and-testing.html

Me and some colleagues were discussing the option of more or less intelligently/randomly rehashing and pulling phrases from other teachers' course evaluations together - since it was a requirement to submit one but no-one ever read them. Let's call it an "experiment" rather than a prank or pure subversion of processes and procedures. We never did carry through though, it was easier just to not submit anything and take the (mild) scolding later (someone telling you that "you should" at some later point in time).

Here's a selection (three examples) of what a colleague of mine has been thinking and doodling about for a long time about "the mediated emulation society":

Knowledge emulation: the expert principle:

The important thing is not what you know.

It's what you can convince others that you know.

Success emulation: the (corporate) CEO principle:

The important thing is not how well your company is doing.

It's how well you can convince others that your company is doing.

Healthcare emulation: the healthcare bureaucracy principle:

The important thing is not what kind of health care you will get if you get sick.

It's what kind of health care you think you would get if you were to get sick.

I finally think me and this colleague of mine have enough ideas in common to sit down and write something together when I come back home after my sabbatical (i.e. sometime next academic year). Keep an eye on my blog for updates - I have to quit this conversation (takes too much time) but I promise to read any answer of yours.

/Daniel

Yes Daniel do keep me up to date.

I love your colleague's emulations principles because they have lots of correspondences to many other parallels.

For me, I probably would re-order the rankings - if that's implied in your listing.

1. Success

2. Knowledge

3. Healthcare

Technologies have assumed the task of healthcare. They are on their way to knowledge. All I can say is that those of us who makes a living on the expert principle - look out!!!

Particularly any expertise that is rule-based. Templates could be created and have been [to answer your issues about the opacity of technicality to human managers]. In Agile, for example, there's no escape. Everything is logged in.

We should better hope there are opportunities and resources for re-inventions - if not more importantly, time. Squeezed out, we are all forced to be CEOs of companies consisting of one employee. So we would need to manage our healthcare and knowledge technological slaves/ masters on top of promoting our facade of success.

All this - to think we were supposed to be liberated when Apple launched that extraordinary ad in 1984, a true MASTERpiece in the literal CEO principle, challenging and re-configuring Orwell's rationality of irrationality/ irrationality of rationality.

We still need teachers for answering questions, scaffolding, the creation and implementation of experiential exercises, and for the mediation of discussion groups focused on increasing critical thinking. In addition, MOOKs alone are still far from utilizing it's full potential.

Michelle, I suppose this is to position teachers as designer/ creator of learning experiences. And yes MOOC/Ks are far from their full potential - the barrier is principally costs, which begs the question who pays for open access?

For further development on this theme, please refer to:

https://www.researchgate.net/project/Technologies-of-Selves-Human-Artificial-Redundancies-as-Intellectual-Waste-Production-Consumption-Circulation-Regeneration/update/5eb30909c005cf000188b3e6