Humans Need Not Apply: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Learning, and the Future of Work

Introduction

The idea of anywhere working is seductive. Ostensibly represented to workers as a choice among the competing options of working availability, anywhere working delivers a range of positive social and economic benefits to employers, employees, and the wider society. These outcomes include regional economic growth, a better work-life balance, improved working conditions, a reduction in pollution with fewer workers regularly commuting to work in petrol consuming vehicles and new opportunities for employers to retain workers and bolster a distributed workforce (cf. Haddon & Lewis, 1994; Messenger, et al., 2017).

In 1998, Davenport and Pearlson flagged the death of the traditional idea of the office, suggesting that technology will make these workplaces redundant. Ideas about different work options including telework, virtual work, and anywhere working tracked the rapid advances in 'information, digital and mobile technologies in business and personal communication' [ICT]. New work options extolled the virtues of these new technologies, advanced notions of flexible work arrangements [FWAs] and improved the well-being of employees. However, what scenarios emerge for anywhere working when ICT delivers unforeseen outcomes?

From ancient Egypt to the present, science and technology have been major game-changers. History mirrors technology's power to alter or even depose the most entrenched social, political, and economic discourses. Thinkers from different worldviews accepted this fundamental proposition. Aristotle knew this, so did diverse thinkers like Fredrich Nietzsche, Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. However, knowing the potential of technology to overturn established ways of doing and thinking is no guarantee that any pundit's view over the horizon will arrive in the manner they envisaged.

Game-changing technologies usually develop over time. For example, the historian Eric Hobsbawm suggested the technological seeds of the Industrial Revolution planted in Britain during the 1780s took decades to propagate. It took a further 50 years for the social, economic, and political changes wrought by this revolution in material production to resonate in the societies of the time fully. When technology develops swiftly, and its uptake is immediate, a different story appears. In the US in 2001, only a handful of people knew of Apple's plan for the iPhone. With its release in 2007, sales topped 1.36 million units. Two years on, Apple sold about 40 million units. In 2019, sales reached 217 million; by then, Apple had dispatched 1.5 billion iPhones across the globe. Apple's revolutionary iPhone technology and the rate of uptake of the device reinvigorated Apple's business fortunes overnight.

These relationships between the development of technology, its application and rate of uptake are fundamental to imagining the future of work in any of its forms. However, whether the rate of change in the social relations of work created by ICT is gradual or rapid, it is contingent on the technology's utility for society. In this light, charting the future of work, workplaces and anywhere working with any degree of certainty is challenging enough. Nevertheless, in 2019, Forbes Magazine presented a blueprint for the future of work, and ITC supplied the foundations of this vision.

The thrust of the case for the future underscored structural changes that would radically reshape ideas of work developed during the first industrial age, the post-industrial age and in today's high-tech digital world (Marr, 2019). Bernard Marr proposed that the coming “4^th Industrial Revolution” would compel employers to develop new mindsets about employees and workspaces, especially concerning the skills and knowledge necessary to be productive in the next stage of capitalism, an age in which automation is likely to be the most entrenched feature of work and workspaces. Marr also raised matters germane to education; specifically, the need to provide employees of the 4^th Industrial Age with “emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills” to cope with the new social relations of work in a highly automated workplace.