Future of work

What will the world of work look like in 2035?

Asheem Singh – the RSA

The robots are coming for our jobs. That will bring mass unemployment and social collapse. Or perhaps a benign world of plenty with universal more than basic incomes. That’s if they are coming at all.

There is no shortage of predictions about the future of work, often driven from simple – or simplistic – extrapolations of technological progress. The RSA has consistently avoided that trap, crafting more nuanced accounts of potential futures, and their latest report continues that approach. It’s built round four scenarios, introduced with an unusually clear and succinct description of the approach:

These are not predictions but scenarios. What we mean by this is, we are not saying any one of them will come to be. However taken together they capture what we feel is the entire area of plausible future, and each one, we hope, shines a distinct light on an urgent set of challenges and opportunities that our future might hold.

As is often the case with scenario based approaches, it’s debatable how far they are independent of each other. But that is almost to miss the point: however structured, the scenarios bring out some profound social and political choices – but with little sign of the wider engagement, understanding and debate that that demands.

Innovation

Getting it right this time: Why the strategy is not about delivery for NHSX

Mark Thompson – Computer Weekly

This article starts with the strategy of an anonymous pharmaceutical company, or rather with a discussion of its weaknesses. Rather more promisingly, it then broadens out to look at the NHS and digital health information.

There is a long and largely unhappy history of bold claims for the application of information management to the health service, which have consumed a lot of money but have had proportionately little to show for it. NHSX is the latest attempt to bring it all together, and the argument here is that this still represents technology modernisation rather than digital radicalism.

That leads to a still more fundamental issue, a challenge to one of the great mantras of digital government, that the strategy is delivery. That’s always been a naive view – it’s fine to argue that a strategy which doesn’t result in delivery isn’t much of a strategy, but the argument that the strategy emerges from delivery doesn’t really hold up. Instead, the question here is whether government should be rethinking its role more radically, embracing the idea of government as a platform, rather than building another platform for government.

Government and politics Innovation

Street lighting in suburban London: a parable for digital government

Richard Pope – Platform Land

A history of street lighting in Croydon might not seem like immediately compelling reading. But both the history and the parallels with digital government are unexpectedly fascinating.

A few points stand out. The first is the retrospective inevitability of commoditisation. The parallel between electricity networks and data networks may seem obvious, how far that moves up the stack and with what consequences is rather less so (because less of that had happened yet).

The second is a different way of coming at a question which has arisen around digital public services pretty much from their first appearance: does a model of government drive the design of online services, or does the building of online services drive thinking about government?

And the third is a good reminder that changing and modernising can be much harder than building from scratch, and that for governments more than most, the new is almost invariably intertwined with the old.