What the workplace will be like in 2060

Twenty year olds entering the workplace in 2015 will be 65 in 2060. What will the world of work and benefits look like then?

            From cataclysmic predictions of mass starvation as foretold in 1970s book The Population Bomb by Paul R Ehrlich, to Tomorrow’s World-style projections that every home will have a robotic maid, predicting the future has for very obvious reasons never been an easy job.

            Compared to academics, science fiction writers have had much better success. It was Arthur C Clarke who predicted GPS; Gene Roddenberry who brought tablet computers to Star Trek, while HG Wells described wireless telephony devices in 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come.

            But in 2015 – the year 1989 movie Back to the Future II was set (and which first featured video-conferencing), it seems there is renewed rush to understand what workforces and workplaces will be like. Why? Thanks to big data and the internet of things there is an appreciation the world of work is about to change. The question is how?

            Of all the areas of futurology, it has been ‘work’ that has been hardest of all to forecast. Fifties polymath Herbert Simon wrote “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” They can’t.

            In 1967 cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky said: “Within a generation the problem of creating AI (Artificial Intelligence) will substantially be solved.” It has not.

The three day week

            In 1972 Geoffrey Hoyle, in his book 2010: Living in the Future, saw a world dominated by leisure, with just a three-day week to interfere with this. But all the evidence is that employees are today working more, not fewer hours a week.

            So if Hoyle was so wrong predicting 38 years ahead, what chance is there that we are better doing the same now – to 2053? Or what about 2060 – the year Isaac Newton actually predicted would be the end of the world? How will people be attracted and retained in a work-world we don’t know about yet?

            “Predicting what will happen to work is partly accepting that lots of what exists today will still exist in the future,” says Graeme Codrington, disruptive futurist at TomorrowToday. “But there are discontinuities that can be extrapolated out.” He says: “I’m convinced that in the next 50 years living to 120-140 will be normal. In 1915 life expectancy at birth was 55. One third of babies born today will live to 100. By 2060 it is entirely possible 80 will be retirement age. What motivates this cohort won’t be money, or training, but flexibility or healthcare.”

            There are certain demographic trends that are largely uncontested. Longer life expectancy (it is growing by 1.5 days per week) sees the Office for National Statistics predict 0.5 million UK centenarians by 2062 (up from only 600 in 1961), out of a total population of 77-81 million.

Will we work longer?

            But rather than worrying about absolute population numbers, experts argue debate will focus around how many people the UK need to work to pay for those living longer, and whether workplaces will have staff working longer because they have to or because they want to. “Currently we’re living longer but health problems aren’t starting later,” says Codrington. “That will change. Forty years ago we were only just having heart transplants. At the very minimum we’ll be having brain augmentation that will see us mentally able to work for much longer.”

            On its own, this suggests the continuation of the multi-generational office where employers need to understand outputs rather than inputs and factor-in agreements for job sharing, compressed weeks or flexibility.But future workforces will, argue some, have to contend with something much bleaker, which could have greater ramifications: automation. And whether there will be too many people chasing too few jobs.

            According to 2013 paper The Future of Employment by Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne 2060 could be a very bad place. They argue 47% of all current people-based jobs could disappear. Google’s top futurist, Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, forecasts similar problems, suggesting one billion jobs could vanish as early as 2022 (2 billion in total by 2030), due to automation and computer algorithms taking the place of people.

Rise of the robots

            Manufacturing roles are among those most prone. Boston Consulting Group argues robots will take 25% of all tasks by 2025, up from the 10% they do today. Already Chinese company Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, is progressing with plans to replace 500,000 workers with robots in the next three years. “The worry,” says Lynda Gratton, founder of the Future of Work Research Consortium, “is that in the past, new jobs and new work was always created from automation and new technology. This time around I think it will be different. Automation could be the end point. Jobs as we know them today will be at a premium, because they will involve a level of mastery that no computer can do. Salaries at this level will become super-heated, as businesses vie to hold onto the very best.”

            This is what many refer to as the ‘hollowing out’ of the workforce. The removal of generalist jobs that can be automated. The paradox, she argues, is that the process of hollowing out will itself bolster the freelance, or on-demand, economy, where workers will sell their intellectual property, then move on, and will not be beholden to traditional retention tools like bonuses or profit-shares. “More and more talent will want to work outside organisational walls,” she says. “Pay won’t attract/ retain them; things like the personal development a project might bring them will become important, as this enables them to sell their skill for more to the next buyer.”

Creative industries will have the best protection against automation, argue the aforementioned authors Frey and Osbourne. But only about 24% of the UK economy is defined as this, according to innovation charity Nesta.