Task Master

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has just published their report on the age of automation and the future of low-skilled work.   They conclude that “automation tends to be task-based rather than job-based, allowing workers to pivot into new roles should machines encroach on their turf.”

We arrived at the same conclusion in our 2016 report, now published as the book Living Digital 2040: Future of Work, Education, and Healthcare (available from World Scientific Publishing’s website and Amazon at Living Digital 2040: Future Of Work, Education And Healthcare).

We go further and suggest that we need to begin to use task-based approaches as the basis to think about what we can do for citizens, companies, cities, and countries. The benefits cut across all these scales: from how we can help workers at the individual-level, to new ways to target job growth at the economy-level.

The future of work then is one where we have to master tasks, thus giving new meaning to the phrase “task master.”