I must admit, although most days, I’m grateful for my job, more often than not, I feel disappointed, frustrated or even distressed by the way I actually spend my work days: in front of a screen, reading and writing emails, slack messages, creating documents, excel spreadsheets, keynote presentations, attending endless zoom or teams meetings and the like. And yes, I do get a kick out of creating a fancy deck, the occasional banter on a slack channel and the new ideas that pour into my inbox in the form of newsletters that sadly often just end up in the ‘archives’ folder. And of course, there is the whole thing about the digital space where I am connected to smart and inspiring people around the world. But mostly, if I’m allowed to be a little bit dramatic, the actual work behind our fancy job titles in the digital realm is often rather dull, lonely and uninspiring 1.
Gathering in changing times
There is change in the air, dramatically offering either salvation or damnation to those of us trapped in the office, cafe tables or home offices by our laptops. By the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, the hype that followed got most digital professionals—if they hadn’t already—to experiment or at least talk about AI-infused platforms2 and their impact on their work.
This shift is what prompted us to gather 20 insightful and curious digital professionals, academics and students into a room and go through a four-month journey of Collaborative Foresight. This multidisciplinary, cross-sector group met on six occasions to discuss, share perspectives and imagine different paths for digital work as a result of ongoing developments in AI-infused platforms. Our conversations were filled with a combination of curiosity, hope, worry and confusion, and a paradoxical mix of powerlessness and a sense of agency.
The usual bleak imaginaries were present in our conversations, and for a reason. There were worries of AI “taking our jobs” as well as the continuation—perhaps even acceleration—of the concentration of power and wealth into the hands of just a few companies and individuals. There was anxiety about what might happen to people, organisations and even countries that won’t be able to leverage the benefits of AI tools or address the security, privacy and vulnerability concerns that come with these technologies. We debated whether many of the signals we see presented anything new, or were just “the business-as-usual of technological development,” this time dressed in AI clothes. We touched upon AI’s role in war, and what its use means for human accountability— a horrific topic that one cannot wish away.
Although our thoughts were weighed down by these and many other concerns and fears, we saw bundles of hope and wishes emerge associated with our experiences and expectations of AI tools, and their impact on work, life and our society. These hopes fell roughly into three interlinked categories: One, that AI will help us do what we already do but better, and with more positive impact. Two, that AI will free up time for us to do what really matters— whatever that is. And three, that these fruits will benefit everyone equally and contribute to prosperity and well-being for all, not just the few. These hopes are beautifully described in the practitioners’ commentary in this book.
Many of us use generative AI tools like ChatGPT as that (very knowledgeable and quick) colleague who always has time for our questions, who offers a second opinion or provides companionship in the midst of a tedious task. Sometimes it even eases the loneliness and isolation of our jobs. But what if AI can do more than this? What if it can enable us to work better together, like free up time for collaboration, help us capture and share our perspectives and build on them, and to value the fruits of humanto- human collaboration - as time-consuming, messy and frustrating it can sometimes be. Perhaps AI will be the one that will usher us into the post-work existence, or at least into a four-day workweek without email or having to deal with receipts! As many authors in the commentary point out, when machines can do many jobs better than humans, the truly human skills will rise in value. Will this free up time for us to spend off-screen, in the analogue world that our bodies, and occasionally our minds, still inhabit?
At best, AI might offer us an opportunity to finally rid ourselves, our organisations and our culture from likening humans to machines, whose efforts can be made efficient. Instead we can start to see the possibilities and find purpose in work that actually is beneficial for our societies and for our planet, in the small and large contexts we spend our lives in.
Letting our minds wander into the future
The uncanny thing about how we think about the future is that it affects our actions in the present. In other words, we act based on what we (individually and collectively) expect to happen, which in turn impacts what actually happens, which then in turn shapes what we expect. Here we are, in a feedback loop.
Unfortunately, this does not mean that if we only think positively—if we force ourselves to see the future in utopian terms—that good things will follow automatically. Our world is more complex and no one is all-powerful. But if you are reading this book, you probably have power, impact and influence over many things, not least in the way AI systems are woven deeper into our work, organisations and societies.
In the following chapters you’ll find five futures set in Southern Sweden. Rather than traditional foresight scenarios, this cycle’s futures of digital work are reframed as very human stories, created by author Paul Graham Raven. Each future is illustrated by Barbara Schussman, using her bespoke generative AI process to create the images with prompts from the story text. The skeleton of each future story was co-created in our workshops, imagined by 20 core contributors and based on the signals, trends or tools they’ve observed or are using today, and then extrapolated into the future. These scenarios where then critiqued and enriched by a group of community members in an open community critique workshop.
When reading the stories and their “source” scenarios, you can probably find signs of things that occupy our conversations, news headlines and analyses. You will discover topics like the importance of accurate data, the binary of digital and analogue, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, the powerful and powerless, the romanticising of returning to nature and many more.
All of these futures are within the realm of possibility. None of them are purely utopias, nor dystopias. Instead, they are a messy mix of worlds, full of friction, as is our world today. We share these futures to provoke thoughts, to call for reflection, to widen perspectives and to initiate discussion and new imaginaries about the possible pathways we are on, and what we ought to do about them today.
But what does this have to do with AI and digital work?
The futures you find in this book are anchored in the core contributors’, facilitators’ and author’s past experiences and current observations, and developed using the collective imagining of Collaborative Foresight. These futures depict five worlds where AI has had a part to play in how humans spend their time, energy and efforts on this planet. You might discover answers to questions you have—or encounter those you‘ve never thought to ask— about work, such as, what might it feel like to live in a place and time where AI has freed up our time to be spent in community, nature and our bodies? Or, what might a future feel like in which we’ve let the centralisation of power in the hands of tech companies run amok? What might happen in our quest for easing our workload with systems that rely on data that should be reflective of the real world for it to be useful, while similar technologies enable the distortion of that very data? And what new ‘bullshit jobs’ might appear? If we let the division of the analogue and digital spaces we occupy continue, how might we bridge this gap, 20 divisive years later?
The beauty of a futures-focused, speculative and dialogue- based approach such as Collaborative Foresight is that it often leads us into age-old questions about life, human nature and how we decide to spend our time and organise our societies. This can be a source of frustration to those looking for the predictions and trend reports provided by many futurists and foresight practitioners, scoping out the latest shiny gadget, the market threats and opportunities to prepare for next year, and attempts to answer questions like, “how do I keep on doing what I already do, but with less friction?” There is a place for these discussions and questions, but the multiple compounding crises of our times require a futures approach that goes deeper, includes more voices, gets experiential and imagines anew.
And besides, it’s perhaps a foolish task to try to talk about futures of work and the tools we use without talking about life, meaning and everything else that comes with it. There is, afterall, something fundamental about our relationship to work. As James Suzman points out3 “The relationship between energy, life and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skilfulness and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.”
“Either we thrive or we burn out.”
You can sometimes find wisdom in a blurb on a post-it. The subheading above was written by a workshop participant answering the question “what do you believe will happen to work because of AI?” Although one rarely finds themselves in a sliding doors moment, there is a sense that this is exactly where we are when it comes to digital work and AI-infused platforms: it is now, in the next couple of months and years, when we will make decisions that define how our futures pan out. This is true of regulation, of AI technology development, of almost all organisations, teams and individuals who are experimenting with, adopting and adapting AI systems in their work.
The core contributor who wrote the following sentence in the first workshop was onto something: “How do I guide myself, my kids, my company and my clients through the years to come, in a human- and planet-centric way?” The struggle to navigate the unknown and the pressure to make decisions and move forward while things are unravelling describes the atmosphere of each of the workshops in this Collaborative Foresight cycle. There was a strong sense of urgency to find answers, guidance or at least some guardrails to use in navigating these times of rapid change.
Many of the innovators, practitioners, academics and students in this cycle felt that this sense of urgency meant they should pause and think longer-term, together. We can’t always afford to pause, to swim against the tide or to put our foot down. But when we have any small power or privilege to do so—be it in an extended fika break, in the daily actions we take, or in the larger strategic decisions we make—we have a responsibility to model the futures we want to see. This book invites the reader to begin this practice, to stay still for a moment, feel these futures of digital work, imagine, then reflect, question and discuss the futures you would like to be part of creating.
