Looking Back on the 'Future of Work' (And What's Next)

When the "future of work" gained traction as an urgent issue roughly ten years ago, self-driving cars were still broadly a fiction. While technologists were certainly building and prototyping, the only place most Americans had seen an autonomous vehicle was in the Jetsons. Over the past decade, however, the technology has advanced rapidly, and the regulatory environment has moved with surprising speed. Self-driving cars are here. Autonomous taxis now cruise the streets of San Francisco, a regular feature for kids growing up in the Bay Area, with other cities not far behind.

This shift may have happened faster than we might have anticipated, but it happened slowly enough that we had time to consider its implications - for our cities, our communities, and our labor force. Today, however, we find ourselves in a different place entirely: generative artificial intelligence (AI) has burst into broad use and commercial application while the machines are still learning. It has prompted a range of important questions about who is benefiting from its development and use, what guardrails are necessary for its implementation, and what swaths of the workforce might be automated right into unemployment.

For the last ten years, the future of work field, made up of think tanks, academics, labor unions, companies, analysts, and other advocates, has explored workforce and labor market trends, the impacts of technology on how we get things done, and shifts in work structures and arrangements. The pandemic introduced a new set of challenges and constraints, and arguably showed us new ways of organizing work and supporting people in America with income and economic benefits outside of employment relationships. In some cases, the future of work conversation focused too much on issues that have proven to be red herrings, or symptoms rather than causes. There was a focus on hardware and robots - in fast food! In health care! In logistics! In apple orchards! - but in hindsight we missed an opportunity to think deeply about generative AI on the same timeline. Convenings on the subject focused on gig work platforms and perhaps failed to see that the segment in greatest need of support and solutions was actually low-wage work more broadly, beyond its specific work arrangements.

In other cases, the work in this area drove true progress and game-changing solutions. We focused more on job quality over job quantity with critical audiences, such as with the California Future of Work Commission. Care workers, the original gig workers, rose to prominence, centering an occupation category projected to dominate the workforce in the coming decades. Care provision, previously an individual problem to solve, gave way to an understanding that care is work that enables other work, that care is a collective need that can be made much easier through policy choices to ensure that both care workers and families benefit. The conversation moved from flexibility to stability, as research shed light on what many workers value most - stability and predictability - notably in the Gallup Great Jobs Demonstration Surveyand related report, "Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States," in 2019. We also learned what factors present the biggest barriers to participation in the labor force, for example the volatile and unpredictable outputs of algorithmic scheduling.

We've exited the future of work conversation of the last decade, and entered the age of AI. While there have been significant changes to work over the last decade, the shift and likely disruption underway now is on an entirely different scale. Many more people - of all ages, races, and gender identities - and many more types of workers - blue collar, white collar, and across industries - could see major impacts to their organizations and their jobs, if they still exist at all. Fortunately, the last decade of discussion and debate offers useful lessons that we can apply to the new and substantial challenges that we face as we enter the age of AI in earnest. In light of this current inflection point, this year, the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiativewill welcome stakeholders to contribute their insights on the last ten years in the future of work. We will ask experts in labor, business, academia, philanthropy, and think tanks to offer thoughts on some key questions, for example:

• What has the future of work field gotten right? Where have we made real progress by identifying important shifts and bringing stakeholders together to see opportunity? What insights have key research efforts of the last decade brought forth, and how can those insights help us moving forward?
• What do we need to think about in the age of AI? How can we take all of this and apply it over the next ten years? How might we build a policy lab for the age of AI to draw on lessons of pandemic policymaking to support workers in a time of chaos?
• Who was represented in the discussion and who was left out? What models or institutions do we rely on too much, and how can we draw inspiration and insight from elsewhere in order to ensure inclusive and comprehensive conversations moving forward? What functional models are out there that offer workers a seat at the table to determine how new technology will be implemented in the workplace?
• What has the future of work field gotten wrong? Where did we focus on noise when we should have seen a signal? What blind spots have we had, and what have the consequences been?

One thing that we have long said remains true: the future is not inevitable. Our choices - in business, in policy, and in civil society - shape the economy, the workforce, and the lives and livelihoods of people across the country and around the world. So we will continue to focus on two critical questions: What is the future of work that we want? And how do we chart a path to get there?

About the Authors

Natalie Foster

Natalie Foster is a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program's Future of Work Initiative, the author of the new book, "The Guarantee" (April 2024, The New Press), and is president and co-founder of the Economic Security Project

Anmol Chaddha

Anmol Chaddha is a fellow with the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program's Future of Work Initiative. He is also principal on the Reimagining Capitalismteam at Omidyar Network, where he focuses on increasing the power of working people.

This piece is part of a series, "Back to the Future of Work: Revisiting the Past and Shaping the Future," curated by the Aspen Institute's Future of Work Initiative, which gathers insights from labor, business, academia, philanthropy, and think tanks to take stock of the past decade - including new technologies and ways of working - and attempts to divine what the next one has in store for our labor force. As the future is yet unwritten, let's figure out what it takes to build a better future of work.

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