Institute For The Future

#IFTFWork: Automated fast food and swarming?

What automated fast food and swarming have to do with your future …

A hackathon might be the best place to find your next project, not a job interview. In fact, jobs may not be the right way to think about work 10-15 years from now.

IFTF has been looking at the future of work for many years. We know that work is breaking apart and being reassembled in a different way today than ever before. We are repackaging tasks, identities, and even our relationships with artificial as well as collective intelligence.

For two days, April 22-23, IFTF is holding its Future of Work Summit, bringing together experts and thought leaders from musicology to spatial design, parallel computing to holocratic governance—all to examine the intersecting drivers shaping the future of work.

Momentum Machines is just one of the signals we are looking at. This San Francisco-based startup's robot chefs can churn out 400 high-quality burgers per hour. Another signal is the game Swarm!, developed for Google Glass. This game finds ways of directing human activity along trails, the same way that ants organize. These signals (and others) point to significant change in the way we go about getting things done.

With tech billionaires Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates talking about technology-led unemployment and the surges in automation, it is just the time to think about the human side of work. What is our purpose, and how do we see work changing to meet our new needs for organizing our lives and livelihoods?

Through four scenarios—growth, collapse, constraint, and transformation—IFTF is exploring the alternative futures that challenge how we can define and do work in the next decade.

For more information

• To learn more about our Future of Work program, contact Sean Ness at [email protected].
• To view IFTF's work-related projects, check out a selection of our work-related research.