Patch #21: Why haven't we found the future of work?
What three influential depictions of the future of work over the last fifty-five years tell us about our progress, our priorities, and where we are now
“The world has arrived at an age of cheap, complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Vannevar Bush, 1945
Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles exhibition QGOMA, via Wikimedia Commons
1. The Mother of all Demos
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute (later known as SRI) led a mind-blowing demonstration of technology that’s gone into the history books as The Mother of all Demos.1 The honorific is, for once, no exaggeration. Calm, plain-spoken, and notably charming in his delivery, Engelbart walks the audience at Brooks Hall through a dizzying array of innovations that would change the world of work. To name but a few, he introduces an instantly responsive computer, a graphical interface, real-time collaboration, hyperlinks, windows, videoconferencing, and, in a kind of one more thing moment, a “forthcoming ARPA computer network” that would, of course, become the Internet.
Fifty-five years later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella name-checked Engelbart’s demo in his introduction to an event entitled Reinventing Productivity: The Future of Work With AI. Nadella’s remarks precede an impressive demo of Microsoft’s Copilot vision, an evolution of computing that seeks nothing less than to help us “reconnect to the soul of work.” As someone who has written and spoken about the future of work and often referenced both Engelbart and Apple’s Knowledge Navigator videos from 1987, the demo made me wonder if we are about to catch the car we’ve been chasing all these years: a long-predicted future wherein machines enable us to unlock our intellectual and creative potential. In other words, are we there yet?
To answer that question, we need to define what we mean by ‘there’, and to do that, we should probably think about what we mean by ‘not there’. For the former, we can turn once again to Engelbart and his team, who grounded their demo, and their broader work, in the belief that the point of all of the technology was to unlock collective intelligence, which they defined as the measure of how well groups of individuals were able to collaborate on challenging problems. Notably, Engelbart perceived that the need to scale up collective IQ was urgent. In his words:
People have got to become more effective at handling complex problems – at their daily struggle with complex and urgent issues. The survival of man seems dependent upon it. Any reasonable possibility seen by society for increasing that effectiveness should warrant serious investigation.2
The future of work, in Engelbart’s vision, was one where individuals were not just more productive, but channeling their energies toward solving the complex and urgent problems that needed solving.
The shadow of this idea — the ‘not there’— of my construct above exists in a future where we all participate in bullshit jobs while the world burns around us: “this is fine” all the time. This was a future German sociologist Max Weber anticipated in 1905 with his famous “Iron Cage” metaphor: one where the emphasis on productivity for its own sake would engender a bureaucratic nightmare in which we would get “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” and “little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones.”3
2. Knowledge Navigator
Twenty-one years after The Mother of all Demos and thirty-six years before Microsoft shared their AI-fueled vision for the future of work, Apple articulated a conceptual, future-facing vision in its 1987 series of Knowledge Navigator videos. While in-house creative teams wrote and produced the videos, legendary computer scientist Alan Kay— once part of the pioneering team at Xerox PARC that built on the ideas of Engelbart and added many of their own — advised on the interfaces and concepts used in the series while serving as an Apple Fellow.
In the best of the videos, a professor, Mike Bradford, steps into his study — which, other than his book-like computing device, could be the workspace of a Renaissance secretary to a noble family — and proceeds, after ignoring a message from his mother, to spin through a series of complex tasks: preparing for an upcoming lecture, getting up to speed on new research, and figuring out next steps with a remote colleague, Jill Gilbert.
We should note that, unlike the other videos referenced in this post, Knowledge Navigator isn’t so much a demo as a speculative fiction designed to articulate where computing might go. Judging from contextual clues, we can deduce that the video takes place in 2011 which, incidentally, is the same year that Apple would actually introduce Siri.
This is notable because the most pronounced aspect of the video is its use of a digital personal assistant that helps the professor focus his attention, interrogate data, and collaborate with others in order to get his work done. Like The Mother of all Demos, Navigator also features videoconferencing and real-time collaboration, but it adds conversational interfaces and touchscreen interactions.
When I watch this video, the thing I notice most his how relaxed it all feels: the professor calmly makes his way through his tasks in a focused, deliberate way. He pauses, thinks, and guides his digital assistant to augment his thinking. All of this speeds up his process without elevating his stress levels. We should also note that the professor is working on a legitimate problem: deforestation in the Amazon.
Another fascinating thing about the video is the introduction of human tension between the professor and his colleague Jill as they work out a way to collaborate on a quickly approaching lecture. While it’s largely played for laughs in the video, we get pretty overt hints that the professor needs to do more of his own homework rather than relying on his female colleague to “bail [him] out yet again.”
Subtext aside, the genuine collaboration between the professor and Jill is the most intriguing aspect of the video for our purposes here. While working out the details of their shared lecture, Jill offers a simulation of projections and Mike contributes his own maps to further their collective understanding. They are not only building knowledge together about an important topic, but will shortly be sharing that knowledge with others. All this, and Professor Mike still has time for a leisurely lunch.
3. Reinventing Productivity: Back to the Future
“A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.” Vannevar Bush
The debate about productivity and technology persists, but it has taken on new forms. On the one hand, we’ve seen countless innovations; on the other, people feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and distraction that, per Cal Newport, gets in the way of their ability to do ‘deep work’. Into this maelstrom storms new, AI-based tools like ChatGPT, which promise to fundamentally alter the information landscape in a way some of my very smart colleagues say is unseen since the arrival of the smartphone at scale. Microsoft’s Reinventing Productivity event gives those of us who watch it a chance to consider the future anew, and ask whether it might genuinely free us of drudgery and allow us to focus on creativity and complex problems — or sap our productivity further as we sink into the muck of complex, recursive, and unceasing glitch storms.
Looking across these three iconic stories about the future of work, it’s revealing how consistent some of the ideas and themes are over time. The role of technology is to save people time, automate the boring stuff, connect individuals to vast swaths of knowledge, and slay bureaucracy. In his opening introduction, in addition to his allusion to Engelbart, Nadella also quotes Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” and its articulation of technology’s role to “collect knowledge, [and] make it easy for humans to retrieve that knowledge with exceeding speed and flexibility.” 4
Over the course of their demo, Microsoft presents a focused, understandable vision for how work will change and, unlike the Knowledge Navigator, they use close-to-or-actually-working, rather than conceptual, technology, and give us insight into the architecture of their system and how its components contribute to individual experiences. The Copilot vision is a compelling one: humans able to “use their own words” to unlock creativity, reduce wasted time, and, as I mentioned in the opening section, to “rediscover the soul of work.”
Note: this is the trailer; you can watch the full event here.
This vision is consistently brought to life through a series of vignettes wherein we see, in turn, how easy it will be to design a presentation or proposal, turn these into communications suitable for other purposes, interrogate and find data, and quickly find and summarize anything you might have missed. The prosaically named “Business Chat” allows users to quickly scan all work-related data sources and “turn [that] data into knowledge.” Microsoft articulates a world where there is far less data lost during the sales process; one where, thanks to the ability to access Copilot across applications, it’s far easier to find the right information at the right time during sales meetings and automate issue resolution post-sale so the buyer achieves a higher likelihood of success. Microsoft’s vision also includes a “multiplayer collaboration canvas” so that teams of workers can co-create in real time, compare data, and make informed decisions. As I said, it’s an impressive demo.
And yet, despite the clarity of focus, I perceive a lack of ambition regarding human potential when we compare Microsoft’s vision to The Mother of all Demos and Knowledge Navigator. Microsoft gives voice to the idea that “everyone deserves to find meaning and joy in their work,” but that idea is never really brought to life in a tangible way, other than the vignette in which executive Sumit Chauhan designs a powerpoint for her daughter’s forthcoming graduation — not exactly a work task. Instead, we see a world where conjuring proposals, presentations, emails, charts, and SWOT analyses is so easy it’s “like magic.” An uncharitable interpretation might be that this is a world where the production barriers to these largely uninspiring outputs fall away completely and we find ourselves swimming in them. It also begs the question: if these things are so easy to produce and they multiply accordingly, why would anyone a. bother to read them and b. pay you to produce them?
The real question, of course, is about the end to which all of these productivity gains serve. In the first section of this essay, I spoke to the gap between Engelbart’s vision of collective intelligence and Weber’s fears that we would evolve toward a world of “little men with little jobs,” but the truth is we can see manifestations of this tension throughout the history of work in different forms, many that pre-date the arrival of computers: running through the ages from Taylorism to Fordism to the Human Relations Movement to theories X, Y, and Z to more recent ideas about the knowledge and gig economies. The elusive future of work is one where we improve productivity and efficiency but do not lose sight of how these improvements impact human experience.
The dream of many a techno-optimist (myself included) is that technology can serve a critical role in resolving this tension. By referencing Engelbart and Vannevar Bush, Microsoft positions itself as the continuation of an ideological evolution whereby tech serves to unlock human potential in service of urgent, important, and meaningful work. In execution, however, the humans are pretty far removed from the demonstrations, and the work they do looks a lot like the work we do now, only faster.
In Apple’s Knowledge Navigator, we have a protagonist who, for all his flaws, is working on the problem of global warming. Emerging from a pandemic where tech-assisted scientists built, tested, and released a vaccine in less than a year from the time Covid was discovered, it feels like we should be making more of a conscious effort to imagine a future of work where the solving of complex and pressing problems is at the forefront. One of these pressing problems might be how to tap the creative resources of individuals who, for any of a variety of reasons, might find themselves confronted with barriers to opportunity. For example, what might it look like for such people to incorporate their personal stories, inspirations, and ideas for innovation into the sales presentations and proposals and documents it is suddenly so much easier to create?
The reason the future of work remains fixed firmly in the future is that there’s still much work to do figuring out how we harness the power of our newly available productivity tools to ends that broadly serve humanity and unleash the great reservoirs of untapped potential. While I’m optimistic that this can be done and it may well feel “like magic,” it surely won’t be easy — nor will it involve technology alone.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: When will AI take your job?, by Tomas Pueyo
Listening: Grapes from the estate, by Oren Ambarchi
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Friendly Evil Gangsta Synth Hip Hop” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Hopes” by Kevin MacLeod via Wikimedia Commons
Source: ARNAS Report, January 21, 1968
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.
Both Vannevar Bush quotes in this essay are sourced from As We We May Think