Out-of-the-Box Thinking: Future Work in the Digital World

In the eighth event of our Out-of-the-Box Thinking series, co-hosted with GlobalNet21 and London Futurists, Dr Becky Faith, David Wood and Charles Radclyffe will discuss the future of work in an age of big data and artificial intelligence that will see a major shift in work patterns and employment

Over the next twenty years, we are likely to witness some of the most significant disruptions to the workforce and work as we know it in recent memory. This has been fuelled by the demographic and socioeconomic trends of the past decade, like rapid urbanisation and globalisation, coupled with even faster advances in technology from mobile internet to increased automation and machine learning.

Automation, digitisation, and trade have dramatically reshaped how firms organise, operate, and compete over the past couple of decades. These changes, in turn, have had dramatic consequences for labour.

While popular media often describe dystopian futures in which robots have all the jobs, a consideration of episodes of automation in the past suggests that many jobs will be replaced, but many more new jobs will be created.

Important questions remain, however, about how automation, digitisation, and trade will affect households, firms, and geographies, including the potential for increased inequality and differential effects by race, gender, and socioeconomic background.

Dr Becky Faith is a Research Fellow and C0-Leader of the Digital and Technology cluster. Becky’s professional experience and research interests encompass mobile communication studies, human computer interaction and technology for social change.

David Wood is the Chair of the London Futurists, and Executive Director of the technoprogressive think-tank Transpolitica. David was one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry, and is now a renowned futurist commentator. He has a triple first class mathematics degree from Cambridge, and undertook doctoral research in the Philosophy of Science. In 2009 he was included in T3’s list of “100 most influential people in technology”. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in London since 2005, and a Fellow of the IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) since January 2015.

Charles Radclyffe www.dataphilos.com is the Head of AI at Fidelity International and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol. He is a regular contributor to Forbes on the subject of Digital Ethics and gave a TEDx on why we should think differently about the impact of robots and jobs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRwvFvQ3M3o).

This meeting is free to all members of GlobalNet21 and Conway Hall Ethical Society but there is a £5 entrance charge to all others.