How to Understand the Future of Work, Workers, and Technology

New America and Bloomberg are convening a group to study the future of work in a new way. Instead of trying to predict the future, and write a recipe of what to do when that future arrives, we treat emerging work trends as enormous, complex, and unpredictable — so we need to prepare to adapt to a wide range of dramatically different scenarios.

We share the rationale for our approach in our piece published earlier in Fortune, “Memo to CEOs: Prediction is a Fool’s Game.”

"In the face of these great uncertainties, prediction is a fool’s game. We have to assume that any number of scenarios could come to pass and be prepared for each of them. We must imagine, not predict; restructure, not plan. And be prepared to adapt at every point.

That means thinking beyond the next election cycle — looking 10–20 years down the road to anticipate the movements of tectonic plates like automation and aging. And our view is that there are no villains; instead, we’re all in this together: technology, business, government, and civil society must all be part of the solution."

We are calling this effort The Shift Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology. The transformation that’s coming is dramatic — as much for the people who work as for our economy as a whole. And technology’s effects could be magnificent, or dangerous, or both.

The Shift Commission will include leaders from business, technology, policy, civil society, academia, culture, and otherwise. Anne-Marie Slaughter and I will serve as co-chairs of the commission. New America was, for Bloomberg, the ideal partner: bold, data-driven, practical, and nonpartisan. When it comes to the future of work, we are all, truly, in it together.

Today at the Bloomberg Technology conference, we are presenting the highlights of the research we are preparing for our commission members. Our economist, Jed Kolko, has examined the government data, and several of the many studies done by others, to upturn some of our conventional wisdom.

We’ll post the research highlights, and share more about our work, at our publication at The Shift Commission.

We look forward to understanding work’s future in this new way.