The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here. Lynda Gratton

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      The force of technology: technological capability increases exponentially

      Working lives like Jill’s in 2025 are fragmented by the sheer breadth and depth of communication and information that weighs on everyday working life.

      What underlies this is the extraordinary processing power that has grown at an exponential rate over the previous decades.¹² In fact, this annual doubling has continued every year and has been accompanied by an equally dramatic year-on-year fall in the cost of microchips. For example, in 1975 the price of a single transistor was $0.028 dollars – by 1980 it had fallen to $0.0013 and within the next decade to $0.00002. By 2010, Moore’s law was showing no sign of slowing, and we can anticipate that more transistors will be packed onto smaller microchips for less money and that processing power will continue to grow at an exponential rate.

      Jill’s working life has also fragmented as a result of the advanced handheld device she carries around with her. The performance of these mobile devices has grown exponentially with a short doubling time (typically a couple of years). In 2010 a phone contained the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 2000. The device that Jill carries has the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computer I used in 2010. What this means for Jill is that in those evenings when she is not online with others she is using her computer to crunch the terabytes of data that have poured out that day from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And when she is not doing that, she is linked into the data beaming from the Mars station to join with millions of other people who are scouring the universe for alien life.

      This increasing power and the falling cost have enabled these machines to be capable of ever-increasing feats of power, from simultaneous translation, to the lifelike graphics of Jill’s personal avatar and the way that she has been able to build complex performance models for her clients. It could be that by 2025 miniature computers are baked into every brick, every piece of clothing and every item of food. What this means is that data is streamed into the office and homes at an extraordinary rate. But it’s not just computing power that has fragmented these lives – it’s also the location and speed of downloading.

      The force of technology: the Cloud becomes ubiquitous

      Jill is able to download highly complex data and programs anywhere, anytime. Already by 2010 most of the regions of the world had a level of connectivity that enabled fishermen in India or the weavers in Tanzania to talk with others and access some information. Over the coming decades this was augmented by an ever faster and easier connectivity to the web and access to bandwidth that enabled the telepresence and holograms which are part of Jill’s everyday working life. Behind this connectivity have been rapid developments in the Cloud. This was first conceived in the early 2000s as an expertise, control and technological infrastructure that would be all-enveloping – hence the name the ‘cloud’. By 2010 services, applications and resources were already available as a service over the internet, although corporate adoption of the Cloud was relatively low, only in the beta phase, and there were many concerns about security.

      These concerns were resolved over the next two decades and by 2025 the global range of the Cloud had increased, with the services available becoming ever more complex. This had allowed hundreds of thousands of independent programming teams to develop their ideas, in much the same way that applications for the iPhone were developed in 2010. What Jill loves about the Cloud is that it is convenient, on-demand and allows her to work with her colleagues to pool their resources. Jill does not actually own the physical infrastructure she uses or the applications she downloads. Instead she rents usage as and when she needs it – paying only for the resources she uses.

      The Cloud has also created endless possibilities for people across the world to access pooled resources. That’s one of the reasons why avatars and holographs are the norm. To use her avatar or work in a holographic representation of her office, Jill simply has to hook up to the immense computational power available on demand from Cloud computing.

      Notice that the fragmentation of Jill’s working life is created by technology in which she has personally invested, and which she uses from her home and the hub she works in. By 2010 the gulf between personal use of technology and corporate use had already begun to narrow as more people decided to invest in home-based technology rather than rely on the technology companies provide for them. By 2010 people had already begun to see their workplace technology lagging behind their personal investment in technology.¹³ Like most of her colleagues, Jill has made a personal investment in the technology in her home and the technology she carries with her.

      The force of technology: ever-present avatars and virtual worlds

      In the pre-fragmented day at least you had the opportunity to relax when you where ‘offline’. By 2025 you are ‘online’ 24/7 and your presence is augmented by avatars and virtual worlds. This development had begun in 2008 when Xbox Live launched its Xbox 360 avatars, which acted as the player’s emotive representative when communicating with other players. Gamers began to customise their avatars’ physical appearance, dress them in clothes bought from an online marketplace, and use them to virtually interact with other gamers’ avatars from around the world. Though initially limited to online gaming, the use of avatars continued to expand into all aspects of life, to such an extent that for Jill her avatar is her primary interface between the virtually connected people she works with. Jill has designed her avatar to be as near a two-dimensional representation of herself as possible. In the online games she plays, she has other more fantastic avatars – but when she is working she keeps to a form that is close to her own.¹⁴

      One of the ways that Jill works with her colleagues is through her virtual workplace, which is a graphic representation of a workplace where all her colleagues can virtually congregate. So as soon as she logs on in the morning, she can walk through her work community to see who else is around. Her virtual timetable tells her when group sessions have been planned, and so she can link up using both her avatar and virtual 3D telepresence to talk in real time with her colleagues.

      For Jill, working and learning in a virtual environment has been a way of life since she attended a virtual university in 2015. She registered and met her instructors and colleagues online and then the instructors used the virtual platform to deliver to the worldwide audience at minimum cost.

      The force of technology: the rise of the cognitive assistants

      The first interruption Jill has on that cold morning in 2025 is her cognitive assistant – or Alfie as she calls it. Alfie has been with her for a couple of years now. It understands how she likes to work, keeps a record of who she knows, monitors her inward communication for interesting strangers and logs the amount of time she works every day – automatically billing her employers for the hours works. Over the years Alfie has learnt how she works and how her working life can be best organised, and this has become more and more accurate to the extent that Jill now relies on Alfie for much of the everyday running of her life. Alfie checks her carbon use, reminds her when her personal carbon budget is beginning to run out, and makes sure that the travel she needs to do works within her personal carbon budget. With so much information coming through every moment of the day, Alfie helps her manage her daily tasks, prioritise what’s important and manage her weekly goals. Alfie is unique – it’s a machine that uses artificial intelligence to build a logic which best fits Jill’s context and working patterns, and evolves as Jill’s preferences become clearer.¹⁵

      Is Alfie like a human? Ask Jill and she will tell you she could not do without Alfie to the extent that it (he?) simplifies her already highly fragmented life. Alfie is not alone. Across the globe billions of cognitive assistants are collecting information, monitoring СКАЧАТЬ