Interesting write up on the state of the Future of Work space from MIT. While there isn’t a lot new in there, its an excellent survey of the major trends and thinking across business and policy.
I think one of the best pieces is the the framing that they use:
As these examples suggest, we can’t stop the dance with technology, but we can choreograph it in productive ways.
This is true, and is both exciting, in that it is a task we can take on, and dull, in that this has, largely, been continually true over our industrial history. Farsighted, which I mostly read on the plane yesterday, makes a good point that despite locally bad news, humanity as a species has got significantly better at making large scale, coordinated efforts to tackle significant and long-term problems. Its not that we’ve solved too many, but it is extremely historically unusual that we are even trying.
I’ve found that the future of productivity, the future of work, is a useful lens to consider these larger societal trends, but at sufficiently broad viewpoints and timescales, they do get rather blended together. These kind of surveys of a field are helpful for putting some structure within a given perspective, and I really appreciate MITs ongoing investment here.