Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
Just Released the 2008 Tribalization of Business study - an in-depth look at how 140+ organizations are managing and measuring online communities
You may have noticed that posting here has been sporadic of late. As usual, it is the perennial problem of balance that is at issue for all of the contributors to Future Tense. Behind the scenes, however, there has been some significant activity of late as we figure out how to re-invigorate this blog, as we all believe that the topics we cover here are important ones, and we still have much to say, new experiences to share, and questions to ask.
We are therefore going to be making some changes in the very near future, the most significant of which is the introduction of a new conversation leader (the term editor will go away). I am very happy to announce that Giovanni Rodriguez, who some of you may know from his blog The Good Seed, will be leading discussions going forward. I will remain as a contributor, as will most of our current contributors.
I have known Giovanni for about a year and a half now, after "meeting" him in the PR blogosphere. He is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR firm. Since the beginning, I have been impressed by the depth of his thinking, as I think you will be as well. Giovanni is very interested in social media and emergent organizations, and will be sharing his thoughts and experiences on this topic. I'll let him tell you more in a following post.
As for me, my focus these days is on corporate transparency/ethics and digital identity. You'll find posts from me here about how those topics impact future of work issues going forward. I look forward to our conversations.
Neville Hobson shares the story of a friend who is leaving his company and the challenges that such movement presents to his reputation/identity/connectivity. He offers a variety of tips on how to manage your "personal presence" (as he calls it) culled from a couple of sources, including Tom Foremski and Mitch Ratcliffe, and adds a couple of his own.
The question of a global, persistent online identity (and corresponding reputation) is a challenging one. One of the big issues is how to measure reputation (not easy). If you are anything like me, your online reputation is fragmented or multiple. I blog in a variety of different places, on a number of different subjects. In each, I have some roughly visible level of reputation. But I don't think I have any global/aggregate reputation. And I can't carry any of those reputations with me easily if I move into a new topic area, for example.
Or to put it another way, say you are the expert blogger at a company. Maybe you are the CEO. And you leave. This throws a wrench in your former place of work's online reputation, and leaves you fragmented. And what about history? Is your past reputation-generating device archived? Does it disappear? Is our reputation so ephemeral?
We are increasingly moving away from easy titles or recognition devices. Our identities and reputations are works in progress, a process if you will. Multiple. Changing. Today there is no really easy way to track and/or manage that. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Maybe something like Squidoo's lenses is a good start.
I have been noodling quite a bit lately on the needed transition to action that online community building demands. Whether it be online communities of practice (associations, alliances, ventures), interest-based communities (dogs, Vioxx, Treos) or distributed work for one organization, I hear a lot about "listening" and "conversations" and "emergence" -- many of these discussions exhibiting a rather utopian bent. While there is still much to learn about those three topics, and many other related ones, it seems there is a lack of widespread debate about transforming all that listening and conversation into action in the real, physical world.
Now, clearly, in the case of distributed work for an organization, the people involved by definition need to produce something in the real world. But are they truly efficient in doing so? In the case of communities of practice (or the perhaps not-so-aptly-designated activist communities), how many of them have really made something happen? A change in behavior, a change in legislation, a person elected, a product designed and delivered, and so on. How many times have we seen a failure of expected result (ineffectiveness or impact failure) despite all of the buzz? Are interest-communities actually convincing people to do something? Do they need to?
I have observed and participated in online communities of practice, for example, where members spent a lot of time happily, kindly, politely debating ideas, but stumbled when it came time to step forward to take action. The activity of getting to action kept running up against strong roadblocks in the form of differing philosophies, reluctance or fear of leadership, the lack of time or commitment to take action, and so forth. Getting to action was (and is) often hideously painful.
I think one key is the design of a community. When action (and the rules that need to be put in place to facilitate this) is an afterthought, you can't hammer it onto a community that has only vaguely addressed it. When action has to happen, all of the hidden biases, struggles, vanities, egos, weaknesses etc. that have been glossed over during the listening/conversing phase jump into heavy relief. And the result can be disheartening and discouraging.
I am going to be digging into this subject over the coming months. If you have comments, examples, sources, and/or ideas please let me know. If you want to write about it in this space, please propose that to me as a guest author. I think it is a truly important subject that needs more attention as ever more of us work, collaborate and communicate online.
Richard Posner offers an economic analysis of the issue of elite professional women leaving the workforce (mainly to have children) from the point of view of the university/professional school. He states that given roughly half (see his post for numbers) of professional women from elite universities drop out of the career world, the full value of their places in the university is not achieved. This means that places didn't go to a number of (mostly) men, who would have more fully "productive careers."
But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her.
The article is an interesting read, and his economic analysis and proposed solutions to the problem are correct from an economic perspective:
A better idea, though counterintuitive, might be to raise tuition to all students but couple the raise with a program of rebates for graduates who work full time. For example, they might be rebated 1 percent of their tuition for each year they worked full time. Probably the graduates working full time at good jobs would not take the rebate but instead would convert it into a donation. The real significance of the plan would be the higher tuition, which would discourage applicants who were not planning to have full working careers (including applicants of advanced age and professional graduate students). This would open up places to applicants who will use their professional education more productively; they are the more deserving applicants.
The problem I have is with his unspoken assumption that labor market practices (not to mention US tax policy) will remain static. Today, these labor practices (and tax policies) are problemmatic for professional women (and men who want to spend more time with their family). I am not going to go into all of the difficulties, but let's state that there are serious issues with work-life balance/family-friendly policies. Enlightened companies are getting on the bandwagon and changing these policies to keep their valuable employees. I would argue that given real change is now possible in the way work is conducted (particularly knowledge work), given technological change and new business models, that the assumption of status quo is a dangerous one.
By focusing as Posner does on economically based measures universities can take, for example, we miss the most important player for in keeping women in the workforce who want to stay: the employer. Any action the university takes in such a vacuum can only have unintended consequences. Better for universities to engage with employers to look at the problem holistically vs. from their individual silos.
I tend to think about power a lot, as it is a core attribute and tool in organizational dynamics. Today, I think traditional ways of generating and keeping power are under significant pressure. After reading Jennifer Rice's post, Brand Humanity: From Processes to People in Brandshift, which talks about how companies are people and we need to focus on those people (and their skills and weaknesses) vs. the processes in order to understand why customer service is so bad (for one), I immediately thought of power. I commented:
Here's one angle into this: People need to gain power (and be rewarded/recognized as powerful) for sharing information vs. hoarding it. When you become an information sharer, you have to be searching constantly for more information to share. You can't stop sharing, because then your power disappears (vs. hoarding where your power is mysterious and can be milked for years without actually doing anything). This information has to be valuable, and you will increasingly need to look for it outside of your traditional organizational boundaries. That is when you will see a dramatic shift in listening (and responding) to customers and other audiences. The good news is that this process (especially with blogging and other network-building tools) is underway.
I copied that comment here because I'd really like to get your feedback on it, particularly as it relates to the debate about the new age organization referenced by Regina below. Can you point me to some examples where this process actually occured?
Here's another article that chronicles how professions are changing, particularly as it relates to the variety of cross-disciplinary skills that are required. As more and more people start working at the intersection of technology - social sciences, for example, I suspect entirely new insights and industries will emerge.
The Washington Post Magazine contained a very interesting article this weekend, entitled "Heaven Can Wait" that explores how retirement is disappearing for some people. Given the demographic realities of America today, delaying retirement is an increasingly necessary thing:
Having examined the demographic trends, the labor force stats, the health and longevity data, the projected costs of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs, the experts have come to a strikingly widespread consensus: Never mind that golden-years stuff. Keep working.
Of course, the government is thinking up ways to "encourage" us to keep working. And given the benefits, there may be a moral imperative to keep working as well, for the good of others.
So one prescription is obvious. Whatever else lawmakers do or don't do -- if they raise the age of Social Security or Medicare eligibility, if they establish private retirement accounts, if they index benefits for longevity -- it would be a fine thing, the wonks agree, if we'd keep working.
It's practically the public-spirited thing to do. If we remained in the workforce longer -- and labor force participation among older workers does appear to be inching upward -- we could postpone the age at which we receive Social Security checks, thus easing the drain. The higher taxes we would keep paying (including continued Social Security contributions) would help fill the federal coffers. And we could ward off a labor shortage that might threaten the whole economy.
The article offers three "serious changes" delaying retirement requires. Do you think these are the most important three? Do you have other ideas? Please share!
(a) Modifying traditional pension practices and regulations that discourage people from working longer.
(b) Persuading employers to get as excited about retaining or hiring older workers as labor analysts are.
And (c) subjecting the societal expectations and sense of entitlement built up over 70 years to a fast U-turn.
What happens when you combine the disciplines of instructional design, corporate communications, work design and incentive systems? You get human performance technology, a professional practice which seeks to build excellent performance in the workplace. I first ran into HPT, as it is known, via an announcement for an upcoming Ragan conference: Communicating with the Workforce of the 21st Century. I thought it sounded intriguing, so I got in touch with Dr. Diane Gayeski, the chair of the conference, a professor in the field and a practicing HPT consultant.
What I discovered was a discipline that, while heavy on published theory, has never really caught on as a major business buzz word. Its roots are mainly in military training, and has strongly rationalist process and assumptions behind it. Given this background, HPT has focused on uniform job/performance requirements, quick and efficient training, top-down management and an emphasis on compliance. Adoption of the practice has often stumbled given its “home” inside the corporation: the human resources and/or training department, generally not known for being a center of strategy with a seat at the boardroom (unfairly or not). Add to that multiple departments all trying to prove they have the “keys to performance”, you end up with people tripping over each other; they have little incentive to cooperate. All of these issues are recognized by Dr. Gayeski and other thought leaders in the field. But they stand by the basic premise of HPT that offers so much promise: the ability to improve department and company performance.
Today marks the real beginning of La Rentrée, when the French return from their 2, 3, 4 plus weeks of summer vacation. In fact, for most retail and restaurants, tomorrow is the day, as they are usually closed on Monday. My experience last week makes me wonder how much longer there can be a real "rentrée" here. Many schools started last Monday and the commuter trains I rode on Friday were virtually full. The news is reporting that some tourist locations are hurting as more and more families are taking shorter vacations, and those vacations are being spent at the homes of relatives and friends, leaving hotels less than full during the peak season. Sure, the French are a long way from losing their standard five/six weeks of annual vacation, but vacation habits seem to be changing.
As an American, I have to admit being jealous of the tremendously generous benefits afforded to the French employee. Yet, having heard the horror stories of being an entrepreneur in France, I realize how difficult those benefits makes it for small companies to succeed. France is braced for big social movements and strikes in late September/early October as people react to government reforms designed, among other things, to make things easier for businesses, in the hopes that it will decrease the unemployment rate.
But back to vacation. I just returned myself from a 2.5 week vacation, during which I stayed in one place, and spent most of my time relaxing vs. running around "touring." It felt exceedingly strange. My usual vacation is one week spent frantically travelling about seeing things and doing things, and a return marked by tiredness vs. rejuvenation. This time, while I checked my email once per day and had to take care of a few work items, for the most part my days were spent reading, getting ready to eat, eating, napping, reading while laying in the sun by the pool, doing a little embroidery, getting ready to eat, eating, watching a movie, then sleeping. Day after day. I got a great tan, put on a couple of pounds and feel simply fantastic. What a great way to prepare for the hyper busy fall months!
Speaking of the fall months, I've got a couple of great interviews lined up to share with you over the next couple of weeks, and will have some commentary on other recent news and events. Stay tuned!
Last month a group of 12 university students representing the global NetGen (a.k.a. Internet Generation) gathered in Budapest for Microsoft's second annual Office Information Worker Board of the Future conference. At the end of the conference, the group issued five predictions for what the workplace will look like in 10 years. They were:
1. Connectivity will be truly ubiquitous. People will be able to work virtually anyplace, at any time. Firms will support this flexibility, while employees will increasingly supply their own connected systems, blurring the line between work life and personal life.
2. Interfaces will be more natural. The user interface will become more natural, contextually intelligent and adaptive — just better.
3. Technology at home will be integrated and include all forms of entertainment. Technology’s reach will extend to clothing and housewares, and personal finance will tie to the shopping experience. Consumer technology (and content) will pour into the workplace.
4. Learning will be driven by the individual. Increasing job movement will lead to greater self-initiated learning through on-demand, continually available forms of education, both formal and informal. The highly dynamic workplace will drive the need for lifelong learning.
5. Access to information will be smarter. Improved tools for discovering and using information will make possible a “collective intelligence,” and managers will benefit by making better-informed decisions more easily.
I didn't find anything particularly new or groundbreaking in these summaries, so I thought I'd get in touch with Microsoft to find out what was going on behind these predictions. What I found was very interesting indeed.
I spoke to Daniel Rasmus, director of Information Work Vision at Microsoft and leader of the Board of the Future project and two of the students who participated in the conference, Cherie Camille Wilson of the US and Varun Sunderraman of India (who now works in London) (their bios can be found here).
According to a new UK study (Working in the Twenty-First Century), as reported by the Guardian, the lowly office desk is endangered by workforce mobility. As a requiem for desks everywhere, I thought I'd share this poem (found via a Google search on "ode to my desk") with all of you:
My old desk, at which I write
An old and faithful friend.
Just like a mule, that bears its load
And doesn't bow or bend.
Sometimes at night, when I can't sleep
And find I need express
The feelings in my heart, so deep,
It gives me happiness.
Just seeing my familiar things,
Pens, papers, books and such,
Creates ideas and I try
To say what means so much.
There is a feel of magic here
Beside this desk of wood.
What stories lie within its drawers,
To tell you if it could!
[Note: The research was done by the Tomorrow Project and the Economic and Social Research Council , but I couldn't find a direct link to the report or, in fact, any information on it on either of the websites.]
Fewer working flex time? That is the question addressed by this USA Today article. "The number of full-time wage and salary workers age 16 and older on flexible schedules dropped from 29 million in May 2001 to 27.4 million in 2004, according to a July report from the U.S. Department of Labor." Two reasons why: Some companies are dropping formal flexible-working programs and workers are skittish about asking for flexibility.
I lie about my "presence" almost all of the time. I am on Skype, which I use mainly for IM as I can't get the voice component to work (long story). As users know, you can choose a variety of presence indicators: Online, Away, Not Available, Do Not Disturb, Invisible, etc. Most of the time I am away or not available. Sometimes it is just because I forget to change my status, others because I don't feel like dealing with anything via IM. I can still be contacted, of course, but I feel less pressured to answer if I have a not available status indicated.
What happens, however, when presence becomes ubiquitous? When it is built into every application? (Microsoft has this as a stated goal according to Mary Jo Foley, who is not thrilled with the idea.) This is when things start to get problematic. As one of the commenters to her article stated:
Submit to "universal presence", whether touted by Microsoft or any vested interest in the IT industry, and you submit to universal incarceration.
So when does universal presence become universal incarceration? When users have no control over it. When presence disappears into the black box of technology, it becomes surveillance. It becomes a tool of power and control.
One way around this is to enabled the watched to watch the watchers. If I, as a Microsoft Office user for example, am "present" to my boss at all times (not to mention the bean counters at Microsoft), I want my boss to be present to me. And the folks at Microsoft. I want to be able to choose to watch them TO THE SAME DEGREE they watch me.
Whether you call it presence or surveillance, companies will be deciding whether, when and how to implement it in the coming years. I think it is important we think about what it really could mean to live and work in that type of society.
I thought this was cool: "beauty activates a part of the brain associated with reward."
So if we are parents or teachers or curriculum designers trying to help young people really find or develop their talents or prepare themselves for their future life's work, we we really should be doing is help them find things that they find beautiful. And when they find it, we can help by giving them space and time and help (if necessary) to think and study more deeply.
There's a report on the subject here (pdf download). I haven't read it yet, but will try to find the time so I can report back to you on it. Any experts on beauty out there? I'd love to pick your brain about ramifications on the future of work.
I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Future Tense's first guest author, Jory Des Jardins. Jory is the author of Pause, where she chronicles her life as an independent in a series of posts entitled, "Living Without a Net," an often hilarious look at the trials and tribulations of working for oneself. Jory is also one of the organizers of the upcoming BlogHer Conference, which will take place in Santa Clara, Calif. on July 30, and will focus on the role of women in the blogosphere. She’s written for USA Today Magazine, The New York Times, and most recently for Fast Company.
This week Jory is going to share her thoughts with us on women and leadership, drawing on her own experiences, as well as research and other leaders' (both male and female) opinions. I am looking forward to the conversation!
My cousin Katie is turning 30 in a couple of weeks, so I felt entitled, as the all-knowing older cousin, to offer a bit of advice on a milestone I passed several years ago. Then I started to think about where I was at 29 and where she is today, and the parallels starting jumping out at me. We had both fast-tracked our careers through our twenties and arrived at roughly the same place at 29:
* A great title
* Completely and utterly exhausted
* A great salary
* Bodies that were really unhappy with us
* Passionate about the theory of what we were doing
* Bored and irritated at the details
* A nice apartment
* Single (still). With cat(s).
Being logical women, we did a cost-benefit analysis of the previous 9 years and, while the benefits were high, the costs were high too -- and growing. Both of us made similar decisions: We walked. Katie is starting her studies for her master's degree full time in the fall. I slept for about six months, fell into consulting, and realized I loved being an independent.
So what does this have to do with the future of work? Well, from an anecdotal perspective, I took a look around at many of the people I know in their 30s and realized that they have made the same decision: to leave a (relatively) high powered, high paying position to pursue something else. Those who haven't done so send me emails all the time along the lines of "You are so brave, I wish I could do that." (Number one reason they don't? Health care.)
Thirtysomethings tend to be invisible these days. You see a lot of debate about boomers vs. NetGen/entry level folks, but not a lot about those now reaching mid-career. And I think that companies should be paying attention: many of these people want to leave.
* While the U.S. still led the world in skill certifications, India showed an increase of more than 300% in just two years.
* Eastern Europe, specifically the Russian Federation, has a significant and growing body of IT competence, while Western Europe and Southeast Asia are also on the rise.
* Canada is a powerful player in certifications, especially in customer support.
* The Southern U.S. led the nation in certifications, reflecting population shifts and the growth of “insourcing” business processes to lower-cost areas of the country.
* India led in Java programming, while the U.S. led in security-based certifications.
* While Microsoft products dominate skills tests for applications, both Linux and Unix administration outpaced Microsoft Windows Server certifications worldwide.
Study co-author Mark Healy, an independent consultant specializing in organizational assessment, hiring, and leadership, is quoted in the press release:
“In their efforts to join the global workforce, these people are shaping the very nature of work, changing the society and the world in which we live. It's important to realize that 'globalization' is not merely a corporate strategy or an economic policy: It's fundamentally a human phenomenon, a new chapter in the evolving story of the planet and its people.”
Synovate recently released their Young Asians study, done in conjuction with MSN, MTV and Yahoo! The study covers the age group of 8 to 24 in 8 Asian markets, and reports on spending habits, media consumption, favourite brands, dreams and aspirations.
Some interesting results:
The Internet and digital technology are fundamental to Young Asian lives, fuelling their desire to stay connected and central to their interaction with peers. 62% have their own mobile phone, 45% have their own desktop computer and half of 12 to 24 years olds name the Internet as the most helpful medium for product and service information over TV (32%) and newspapers (10%).
Here's a take on India's results. They are very confident about the future:
Only 7% of GenX Indians are worried about finding employment and a mere 5% get anxious about financial stability,
GenX appears to be defined differently than in the US; it is the "post reform" generation.
Back in May, I wrote about how organizations can shortchange themselves by pigeonholing employees into tightly defined job categories:
So, maybe it would be fruitful for companies to rethink how they define jobs or assign job titles. Perhaps, rather than saying "you work in technical support" or "you are a marketing person" they should uncover the frame through which their employee or potential employee views the world and place him or her in the loosely-defined work boundary that best fits them. Of course, that requires rethinking how we partition out work.
This past week, I have run across three different sources that brought these types of boundary battles back to mind. The first is the concept of "productive friction" as explained by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown in their book The Only Sustainable Edge. The second was the use of "collaborative sessions" in product design, as described by Sasha Verhage on the blog Boxes and Arrows (found via CPH127). The third was Tom Peters' directive to include designers and women, for example, in decision making in his Change This! Re-imagine Manifesto.
All of these sources speak to the need of getting out of the rut of throwing the same old people at problems and expecting to get something other than the same old solutions. Heterogenous groups may be more difficult to manage, but the results could be more creative and effective.
Interesting article in the San Jose Mercury News (free reg. req.) about the emerging trend of rural sourcing. The premise: Why outsource to Bangalore when you can outsource to North Dakota?
Arnold Kling at Econolog offers a few hypotheses on why 20 somethings aren't being used to their full intelligence level (see posts here and here to follow along) His last one struck me:
It takes a lot of effort to challenge employees. It's less risky and less time-consuming to give them scut work.
It got me wondering: If we believe in the hypothesis that managers are overworked, is this responsible for them simply just not having the time to nurture and challenge their employees? (be they 25 or 55) Is this not the equivalent of eating your seed cord (unhappy employees leave)?
At least in my experience as a manager in the professional services industry (PR agency), I spent the vast amount of my time managing client relationships vs. my team. Billable hours were the focus, and, given we were always understaffed (this was the late 90s boom years in Silicon Valley), I have to admit my junior staff didn't get the amount of attention from me they probably needed. It was sink or swim, learn by osmosis. Some thrived, others left. And in the end, I left too, completely frustrated and burned out.
In a couple of weeks, TransVision 2005, the 7th annual transhumanism conference will take place in Caracas, Venezuela. I am acquainted with the conference chair for the program, Jose Cordeiro, through some work I did with the Millennium Project a few years ago. I thought it would be interesting to catch up with him and have a conversation about transhumanism and what it might mean for the future of work. Along the way, he introduced me to the chair of the Venezuela committee, Santiago Ochoa , so I sent them both the same questions via email and asked them to respond.
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase. We formally define it as follows:
(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.
There are a variety of ideas that go along with transhumanism, including superintelligence, singularity and extropy. Perhaps the most well-known feature of transhumanism is its seeking of immortality, most visibly represented by Ray Kurzweil.
I read through a variety of resources (listed at the end of this post) about these topics, and was struck by how there was virtually no mention of work. With superintelligent, immortal transhumans running around, what would that mean for work? Now, I ask that question in a tongue-in-cheek fashion here, but honestly, as we look into the future, the increasing melding of technology and humans seems to be inevitable. So it would seem worthwhile to discuss what these trends might mean for work. Our Q&A, accomplished through email, follows. I have edited some of the answers for length.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
