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Thanks to everyone who came to Podio HQ and kicked off the new year with a great meetup. Our guest speakers; Ingrid Haug, founder of Usable Machine and Claus Bindslev, owner of Bindslev Nextstep, gave a great insite into how work tools and organisations are changing towards the Future of Work.

There's been a lot of talk about the future of work. But what exactly is it? Although the future is tough to predict, especially at the speed with which we are all moving, there are some common elements that have started to emerge.

Until There Is Nobody Left To Buy Anything. You Know, for Profit! How to Work for Free for the Richest Companies in the World: The pattern of fostering a community of people to essentially do your work for you -- to assume the risk of trying new ideas, without any guarantee of safety -- [is...]

The recent book, Race Against The Machine, has caught the imagination of a growing body of readers. It's an important book, but it doesn't go far enough in highlighting the root causes of the unemployment we are experiencing.

By James H. Lee Jobs are disappearing, but there's still a future for work. An investment manager looks at how automation and information technology are changing the economic landscape and forcing workers to forge new career paths beyond outdated ideas about permanent employment.

Employers need to radically change old working models, writes Alison Maitland, senior visiting fellow at Cass Business School. Rapid advances in communications technology, including social media, are shifting the balance of power in societies at many levels and enabling a revolution in when, where and how we work.

In our last blog (which you can see here), I hosted a guest blogger, Chris Ritchie, who wrote about how the job market is a major problem for people in their twenties and early thirties (whom I'll call "Echoes"), and got a spirited response from a number of readers.

The Wall Street crash was still a year away when in 1928 John Maynard Keynes spoke to an audience of Cambridge undergraduates. The great economist told the students that by the time they were old men the big economic problems of the day would be solved.

The claim that robots are taking our jobs has become so commonplace of late that it's a bit of a cliché. Nonetheless, it has a strong element of truth to it.

Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife Finally, some statistics to prove the stereotypes right. According to a recent survey from Millennial Branding and Payscale, Millenials really are most likely to be employed in service industry jobs. So, all those jokes about post-graduation latte pouring and t-shirt folding haven't been in vain.

Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife Finally, some statistics to prove the stereotypes right. According to a recent survey from Millennial Branding and Payscale, Millenials really are most likely to be employed in service industry jobs. So, all those jokes about post-graduation latte pouring and t-shirt folding haven't been in vain.

he White House likes to talk about manufacturing, and it's easy to fetishize the honor in "making things," but when you get right down to it, it's a services world, and we're all just living in it. The manufacturing sector makes up about a tenth of GDP. It's a crucial, productive, and fiery tenth. But it's just a tenth. The vast majority of us are working for the government, administering health care, serving food, manning an aisle, or doing something else while sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day. The Services Economy isn't a new development, but it's deepening with each passing decade. Between 1990 and 2008, we created 27.3 million net new jobs. Health care and government alone accounted for 40 percent of that growth, according to economist Michael Spence. Adding in retail, food services, hospitality, and construction*, these sectors accounted for two-thirds of job growth over those two decades.

On Sunday, I learned that a "wantologist" -- what, you don't have one? -- is somebody paid to figure out what you want. Arlie Russell Hochschild, writing in the New York Times, quotes Katherine Ziegler, wantologist, helping a client to figure out what it is that she wants. The conversation went something like this:

he enhancements discussed ranged from technologies that are starting to have impact in the near term (such as pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and nutrition) to those further downstream such as artificial exoskeletons and sensory enhancements. For me, the highlight of the day was the animated discussion that ensued as attendees reflected on the potential implications of enhancement technologies. How should they be regulated in the context of work? Who would pay for them, or decide what becomes available? And is 'enhancement' even an appropriate term to use?

"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."

News analysis, features, special reports about emerging technologies and their impact for innovators and business leaders. Published by MIT since 1899.

The 30th ISPSO Annual Meeting will explore the Future of Work from a psychoanalytic perspective. How do we now understand what is 'work' in the light of globalization, networked communities, instant information, demographic, technological and climate change? The centre of gravity of global enterprise has shifted southwards, opening new markets and creating new wealth but the gulf has widened between those have employment and those who are unable to gain entry into the world of work. 'Unwork'; unpaid, insecure non-­‐ employment is the norm for millions; what are the implicationsof this?

A growing number of workers are becoming increasingly concerned about the future viability of their jobs (if they have them) and, in many cases, that of their professions.

In this paper will be discussed different types of scenarios and the aims for using scenarios. Normaly they are being used by organisations due to the need to anticipate processes, to support policy-making and to understand the complexities of relations. Such organisations can be private companies, R&D organisations and networks of organisations, or even by some public administration institutions.

After I wrote The Future Of Manufacturing Is In America, With Robots and 3D Printing, commenter and former TreeHugger writer Ruben disagreed, saying "robots are fantastically expensive and resource-intensive. Humans, on the other hand, can eat almost anything put in front of them." True, but humans also need bathroom and coffee breaks, and the occasional birthday cake.

Various items on the Future of Work