The Future of the Workplace
May 2023 Ink2Quill Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

The workplace has definitely changed these past years, decades even. The XXth Century brought about the birth of the workplace where people would spend the day together working for someone else in spaces called an offices, factories or businesses. There has always been specialized work done by people with training but in the past century the number of specialized people at work has just ballooned and not to mention the skills and tools people today use as opposed to a century ago. The computer, or more importantly, the internet continues to revolutionize the workplace and the nature of work. Some jobs will disappear while others will be born as has happened before. And the new force that will change this workplace is A.I. This will speed up work tasks and productivity in some areas and cause copyright and creativity issues in others.

But the question I have is what really will the workplace look like in the next, say, 10 or 20 years from now? I suspect that so many more people will work from home or remotely and this will be facilitated by A.I. and implants we will most likely have. Communication will be lightning quick and some work tasks will be done and sent instantaneously. Imagine that you are working remotely and that you are asked for a report and that the task is done in the blink of an eye thanks to A.I. and sent just as quickly as it is done. Now imagine someone who works for a large company who oversees, thanks to A.I., the traffic of vast amounts of information going all over. This vast circulatory system of data could reach the complexity of action on the scale of an organic life form. And it would all be invisible to us, moving too fast for us to grasp. The decisions A.I. would make would be at speeds far faster than what we could perceive. A.I. would be living in an entirely different dimension from us. One that moves at the speed of light.

The hiring of people could get more sinister too. Imagine job applicants having all information about them online gathered, stored and even sold without their knowledge, consent or even verification. So that a picture of you and your friends at a bar after graduating from college could be interpreted in a malefic way by the A.I. settings of the day. A hiring algorithm might be looking to weed out people it assumed had alcohol dependency problems even though such might not be the case. Information is becoming a powerful weapon indeed in this modern age and A.I. would be the gatekeepers, and banks for all this knowledge and the decisions made with it. Such a scenario is a true danger to everyone.

The worker of tomorrow would be a different kind of person altogether. If medical technology continued to advance and the worker of tomorrow had access to it they would not only be more fit but probably forced to be so. Reminders of gym appointments, and weight increases and glucose levels would ring in our heads or flash red in our vision like our lives were a computer game. Ordering that tiramisu too often might get you a warning which would eventually go to that big bank of information about us all in the sky. But we would eventually get used to being told how to live our lives or be conditioned into it from the time we are children.

The good side of this emerging technology would be how well it could cover for you when you needed it. Imagine oversleeping and the A.I. telling you that you missed an important call but that the person would be calling back in a minute because the A.I. knew when you would wake up, thanks to its predictive capabilities because it knows you so well. You might breathe a sigh of relief in such a case.

This new society will create a new underclass of people who are forced to live on the outside of society. That means that they would not have access to resources, health care, justice or the job market because A.I. would weed them out over and over. This underclass would have their reputations destroyed through the justice system, malicious social media or predatory reputation destruction companies. Yes, predatory reputation companies will probably come into existence soon. These are the people that would not be part of the new workplace.

I think in this new, emerging workplace the happiest people are those that can grab as much of their independence and freedom as possible. They might call themselves entrepreneurs, small business owners or “people independent from the job market”. Either way these self made people would not be flunkies like the those seeking to stay in the office workforce at all costs.

We have changing times ahead. The new technologies will not end the world anymore than cars and buses brought about an end to life as we know it. Think about where you intend to be in this changing world.

Written by John Ink2Quill

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