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"Talking about the future of work, says Canterbury University wearable computing expert Professor Mark Billinghurst, remember when there was a girls' typing class at school? Ah yes, 3Gen clattering away on heavy upright typewriters between classes on Pitman shorthand and bookkeeping. The nation stocking up on its supply of secretaries. All that effort training for something and not seeing the changes already coming. In the 1970s they might have got, what, a decade or so's use out of those skills? And now the pace of technological advance is approaching warp speed. As Billinghurst, head of Canterbury's Human Interface Technology lab, asks, who the heck is going to have the job they originally trained for in another 20 years?"

As we move into a new way of work - one based on more fluid and looser connections, grounded in freethinking, humanist and scientific approaches to the social contract - it's becoming clear that the traditional model of "collaboration tools" is based arou

Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of a termite's environment (as in the case of building and maintaining a nest) triggered a response

"The problem isn't just the machines, however; it's what machines do to thinking. In his book, "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans," Mr. Head bemoans a triumph of computer-led systems thinking and so-called "scientific management." These have led to "misindustrialization," he writes, in which service workers' emotions are manipulated to optimize retail sales, and Oxford dons are judged by a "research excellence framework" that compels them to publish nonsense to meet irrelevant standards."