There’s been a lot of talk lately about the future of work. Much of the time, these conversations are fueled by the anxiety many of us share as we try to understand the impact new technologies will have on our industries. We tend to reduce these discussions to binary arguments — how smart machines will do extraordinary things to improve our lives, or how this or that innovation will make human labor obsolete, creating a jobless dystopia.
Both conclusions strike me as somewhat specious. It’s not that these concerns aren’t valid, but they oversimplify a more complex phenomenon.
