TW Reads: Future of Work (August 2014)

The TW Reads are collections of links to articles from the web, curated by Third Wave. Each collection is focussed on one topic.

Learning from independent workers

Bryan Boyer has written a fantastic series of essays about the future or work. He looks at trends and motivations among independent workers today to provide a framework for designing services and policies for the work of tomorrow:

1. Bye bye, Busytown
   Understanding independent work
2. The Leading Edge
   Independents are an early warning system for the economy
3. Market realities and networked dreams
   Independent work between the cracks of the old economy
4. Fringe benefits
   Independent work beyond the individual

On the “second machine age”

• Stop predicting the future. Leave that to the robot who’s going to steal your job
  PEW asked almost 2,000 experts if robots will steal our jobs and they were divided almost exactly 50/50 about that, which leads Jess Zimmermann to the conclusion that of all the things that we humans are really bad at and which we should leave to the machines, predicting the future might be one of them.
• Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma
  “So, it’s not a shortage of caregivers, it’s a shortage of caring.” Zeynep Tufekci weighs in on the discussion about robots taking our jobs.

Work skills of the future

• Constructive Uncertainty
  Now that we are more aware of our cognitive biases, how can we create work-arounds in group settings? Stowe Boyd recommends a concept introduced by Howard Ross: constructive uncertainty.
• Constructive Procrastination
  A well-balanced reflection of technology-induced procrastination by Frank Hangler, mentioning among many examples the concept of digital dualism by Jurgenson and Morozov’s famous safe.

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