Fashioning the Future of Work

I was fourteen when I first had to think about the future of work. Prior to that I hadn’t really made a distinction between the things I did to entertain myself and work — having spent most of my school holidays enjoying helping my father cut and pop-rivet together gutters, dig trenches and glue pipes in his plumbing business. Work to me was an opportunity to be outdoors, learn and spend time with my Dad. One hot March day in Melbourne, stuffed in a portable classroom I was given Barry Jones' Sleepers, Wake! to read. Barry’s key thesis was that the nature of work was changing, and much of what we do will be replaced by technology and we could (emphasis on could) live a life of leisure. He wrote that book nearly forty years ago. What strikes me is how much of what we do has changed, and yet now we seem busier than ever.

The Future of Work is topical, in part because of the talk that artificial intelligence (read: machine learning) and increased automation will take over our jobs. It is something I’ve been pondering as the CIO of Australian Post and the responsibility we have, where for every job we create in rural Australia two others are supported. I thought I’d share some of my thinking about the future, with the view to tap into this network to get your views on how the future of work.

Firstly I should state the obvious: I can’t predict the future. However, secondly, the best predictions I have seen are done by looking at what has happened. The past helps fuel our imagination of what might happen while also grounding our thinking with reality. To make this a little bit more fun and hopefully interesting I am going to look at one of the oldest and most enduring industries known to humanity: the manufacture of clothing. From its history, I’ll then pull out some key themes that I think are instructive for thinking about the future.

Starting at the beginning: on a cold day, in Central Asia, 45,000 years ago a needle was made by punching a hole into a sharpened bird bone. The invention of the needle shifted fashion from binding furs with cord around our bodies to sewing the skins together to make jackets and pants (though binding continued for a long time around legs). A whole new industry of stitching was created — and a surprising range of other industries took off as well that nobody could predict: manufacture of non-clothing products such as bags, tents; embroidery and bead work; and the truly unexpected: surgery — stitching wounds to aid in healing (the oldest suture found is in an Egyptian Mummy dated 1100 BC). 

In 9,000 BC in Western Asia people began to spin thread out of wool. It was much easier to sew cloth than to put a needle through leather, and with this new technology sewing really took off. This should have been the death knell of the hunter, but instead was a boom for the weaver and trader, opening up trade routes both East and West. Weaving was labour intensive, as a consequence people kept the fabric largely intact — hence the fashion of the sari, the toga, shawl and cloak. Cotton was also the basis for sail cloth which coated with fat was more durable and aided trade using the monsoon winds.

It took 9,500 years for the next major innovation: the cotton gin. The cotton gin is essentially a series of metal fingers that pull cotton fibres into strands and removes burrs. The first handheld cotton gin was found in the Indian subcontinent and dated to around 500 AD. It sped up cotton production manyfold. Cotton was a significant wealth creation for traders and resulted in other unexpected outcomes (e.g. the concept of zero — a mathematical idea that originated in the Indus Valley — being mixed in with Arabic numerals and eventually picked up by Europeans in the 13th Century; fuelling modern mathematics). The invention of the cotton gin did not displace manual work, rather it accelerated it, resulting in cheaper fabrics, and closer cut cloth that fitted the body more elegantly than the sari or toga. 

In Europe the weavers trade guilds prevented the importing of cotton cloth, but allowed the import of the raw material. As trade increased in the 18th Century a number of inventions in the loom increased to speed up the weaving of the cloth. The most impactful being by Arkwright who developed the water frame (powered by a watermill) in 1769. Previously work was in people’s homes. Now they had to go to the work site, i.e. the power source was in a physical space, laying the foundation for factory work. 

To satisfy the growing demand in Britain for raw cotton, southern states the US increased plantings. Building on the worm-gear roller gin (which was invented during the fifteenth Century in the Moghul empire) Eli Whitney mechanised the cotton gin in 1793. His invention used a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, as brushes removed the loose cotton lint to stop blockages. This sped up production so fast that the bottleneck became the cotton pickers, which saw a massive growth in slavery in the southern US (increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850). The unexpected consequences of this were massive growth in cities such as New Orleans, Galveston, Charleston which became enormous ports to ship to Europe (and all the jobs to support the city and trade). The promise of profits also led to a significant growth in the manufacture of textile machinery (and associated manufacturing jobs, mining, railroads, and a whole new industry associated with machine tools in the 19th Century. In just twenty years cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. It could also be argued this ultimately led to the American Civil War.

Another surprising and unexpected consequence was the Jacquard loom invented in 1804. It used punch cards to simplify the manufacturing of complex patterns, and became the inspiration for Babbage and Lovelace’s first computer in the mid-19th Century; and eventually used by Hollerith for his tabulating machine (his company was called the Tabulating Machine Corporation, and renamed to the International Business Machines (IBM) by James Watson). 

The twentieth century saw new innovations with dyes and chemical development creating new materials that transformed fashion (think lycra and other polyesters). This again spawned new industries, with an exposition in designers and industrial production. In our own century fashion has fuelled the growth in on-line retailing (and is fuelling the transformation of Australia Post’s shift from mail to parcels). And to close the loop, it was the excess capacity in Amazon had in its data centres that led to them originating the Cloud business model, that has enabled machine learning to operate on scalable infrastructure, that I'd argue has prompted thsi existential question again on the future of work. 

So what are the general principles we can learn about how emerging technologies will change the future of work? 

• Technology will augment rather than remove skills  (think more clothes for fashion than just subsistence dress). 
• Machine’s are good at doing things we find hard (repetitive work — whether manual or intellectual such as calculation, and heavy lifting; and predictable work); but are not so good at things we are good at (think highly variable objects to be moved) and our softer skills such as care, curiosity, collaborating, motivating, inspiring and creating.
• New industries will be spawned (think surgery, precision tooling, computational machines). The shape of these will be limited only by our imagination and useful application.
• What we do will be transformed — again for both good and bad. This has been happening for ever. The choice is how well we manage this. Accountants can become data scientists; machine engineers can become IOT and cyber experts
• Unexpected consequences are inevitable (think surgery, trade, slavery, machine tooling, shipping, child labour — note the mix of good and bad).

Some unintended consequences already being seen

• Production will be further democratised, i.e. machine learning requires very low capital investment to use (this is perhaps a seismic shift in the nature of work); what will enable entry is education, courage and a willingness to adapt (a real premium will be placed on learning agility)
• Devolvement of the employee from the employer. We are already seeing this in the gig economy. This is not a necessary part of where we are headed, but unchecked could lead to some social unintended consequences (think slavery didn’t need to exist to increase cotton production, but did exist to increase profits).

In closing, I think Barry Jones (as brilliant as he is) missed a beat in his forecast that we would have more leisure. The fundamental challenge is human nature: we want more. Our lives are materially richer than they have ever been, and yet we are still not satisfied. This will shape the future of work more than any technology will. As a consequence I don’t think job’s are going anywhere fast; work however will shift and change as it always has. What we need to do is ensure that we use the potential to create new jobs, while mindfully reskilling.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.