The Human Side of the Future of Work: Understanding the Role People Play in Shaping a Changing World

For as long as there has been work, there has been a “future of work,” through humans’ ingenuity and drive to get things done easier, faster, and better. With the industrial revolution, efforts to shape a better future of work were dominated by improvements in machinery that soon led to fears that these machines might take away jobs from workers, enriching the rich and leaving the poor poorer (Allen, 2017). Later, John Maynard Keynes (1930) optimistically predicted technological unemployment (a net loss of jobs due to shifts in the nature of work outpacing the economy’s ability to redeploy talent) would be short-lived, and John F. Kennedy doubled down on the point in 1962 by saying that “If [people] have the talent to invent machines that put [people] out of work, they have the talent to put those [people] back to work” (cited in Baker, 2018).

Today, we find ourselves wondering yet again what the future may hold. The tone of “future-of-work” discussions over the last several decades has become decidedly more mixed—with some predicting enduring and far-reaching hardship for certain kinds of talent and others emphasizing the upsides of technological innovation and our resilient global economy (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Raisch & Krakowski, 2021; Rifkin, 1995). The need for research on the changing nature of work, roles for humans, and societal implications of shifts in both has perhaps never been greater, as technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) present discontinuous possibilities for organizing economic activity. This Academy of Management Discoveries (AMD) Special Research Forum (SRF) contains eight carefully curated articles that address these issues.