What I got wrong about the future of work

In 2011, I published The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here, looking ahead to 2025. Now that 2025 has passed, I can see where my forecast missed. I overestimated robotics. I underestimated large language models. And I did not foresee the pandemic, which changed where millions of people worked and how they thought about work’s place in their lives.

Some of the broad forces I wrote about — technology, globalisation and demographic change — have indeed reshaped work. But they did not arrive in a simple, predictable sequence. The technologies that seemed most futuristic were not necessarily the ones that mattered most. Looking back has made me more cautious about forecasting, and more interested in the choices we make as change unfolds.

I’ve studied work for almost 40 years and seen it transformed by computers, the internet and smartphones; by globalisation and the growth of service and knowledge work; and by changes in who works and how families organise their lives. For many, work has become less tied to a particular place and more connected to teams, customers and colleagues across the world. Information that once took days to find is now instantly available. Yet that connection can also mean work follows us home. The boundaries between working time and personal time have become harder to see.

One image of work has proved remarkably durable: the career ladder. It was a powerful metaphor for my father’s generation. It captured a working life that many people recognised and aspired to: join an organisation, learn your trade, prove yourself and take on greater responsibility. Each rung made progress visible. In a promotion, a rise in pay, more authority or greater standing. The ladder also gave employers a role in the story, with a hierarchy of jobs and a route through it.

But the ladder offered an identity, too. Work helped answer the question “Who am I?” The role you held, the organisation you belonged to and the direction you were moving all helped tell your story. When the ladder was a convincing image of working life, it could also be a convincing image of who you were. As work changes, the images we use to imagine it and the identities we build around it also change.

Artificial intelligence brings that question sharply into view. I am constantly asked whether AI will destroy jobs on a vast scale, and whether there will be enough work for people at all in 40 years. This anxiety is about livelihoods but also about identity. If machines can perform tasks through which we have measured human skill and intelligence, what is work for? What do we contribute to one another? And what will it mean to be uniquely human in a working world increasingly shared with machines?

I am wary of claiming to know how much work will remain, or what it will look like. But governments and companies do need to take seriously how work is redesigned, who shares in the gains, and how people maintain security, purpose and the chance to contribute. If paid work becomes scarcer, those questions will reach well beyond the workplace, into how we organise income, status and a sense of belonging. One of the predictable forces shaping the future of work is longevity. We will work longer, and these longer lives will stretch across more stages: paid work, caring, learning, returning and beginning again. So learning will no longer be concentrated at the start of life, and we will need chances to renew our skills and rethink our direction along the way, with support from employers and institutions as well as from one another.

I am describing another image. Not of the ladder, but of the weave. Here work is one thread among many, including: mastery, knowing, friendship, intimacy, calm and adventure. And a recognition that a life can grow stronger through those connections as well as through promotion. A sideways move, a period of caring or time spent learning can strengthen a working life, even when it does not take us higher.