By Jim Dator
It is not exaggeration for me to say that one of the most important experiences that led me to discover and co-invent futures studies in the early 1960s while teaching at Rikkyo Daigaku in Japan was reading the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, written as a memo to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).
The Committee had been organized by W. H. Ferry of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, with thirty-four contributors, and published as a pamphlet. The futurist Robert Theobald was the seminal visionary while Ferry marshalled other participants, including Barry Commoner, Norman Cousins, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Linus and Helen Pauling, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, Leo Slizard, Edward Teller, Albert Szent-Gyrobyi, and Henry A. Wallace. I cannot imagine a more illustrious group of humans on the Earth in 1964, and so I took the report very, very seriously. It influenced my futures research forever.
The three revolutions the report discussed were:
The cybernation revolution — increasing automation — was transforming and potentially ending the centrality of “work” in human life.
The weaponry revolution — especially the nuclear bomb that promised mutually-assured global devastation if used — had already transformed, and possibly could end, warfare.
The human rights revolution, which was just beginning, was transforming racial and gender relations. Possibly, formal and informal racism and sexism will end.
The report focused overwhelmingly on the cybernation revolution. Many of the issues being discussed now about the impact of AI on work were hotly debated, with viable solutions proposed back then.
A slew of organizations were created, educational curriculum written, and books, reports, and articles produced and consumed.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred positively to the report in his last sermon before his assassination.
My very first futures publication was titled, “Oh, We Belong to a Cybernetic, Post-Money, Situational Ethics Society, my Baby and Me.” It was published in a vastly shortened form in the World Future Society’s August 1967 issue of The Futurist, pp. 53-54, as “Valuelessness and the Plastic Personality.”
My first deep-dive into the implications of cybernetics — suggesting that the only attainable response to automation and AI was full unemployment — was in my address to a joint session of the Hawaii State Legislature in January 1970.
In that talk, I also said that equally urgent was recognizing the emerging challenges of The Greenhouse Effect (aka, global warming) and other environmental provocations (aka, the Anthropocene Epoch).
The 1970s saw a merry maypole dance of frenzies around these issues, all brought to an abrupt and permanent end by Reaganomics and its neoliberal global wannabes. The full purpose of life then was to achieve continued economic growth and great personal wealth through our labor. When that became impossible for most of us in our hollowed- out economies, the Isaiahs of creative destruction urged us to rejoice as we continuously invented frivolous processes with silly names, such as electronic malicious gossip mills (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, X) and services (Amazon, Pay Pal, Uber, Doordash, Chat) from which a few people miraculously became super-super rich as well as (even more incredibly) politically influential, while the rest of us didnʻt, and so cheered wildly and voted enthusiastically for our savior Trump, Duterte, Le Pen, Orban, Modi......
In the meantime, the Earthʻs climate steadily changed while on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT transformed the world.
For what it is worth, according to my research and evaluation, any serious discussion about the futures of any human activity at the present time require consideration of at least these five system-altering processes already well under way:
1. Climate change (and the other features of the Anthropocene Epoch);
2. Automation, AI, and full unemployment (whether by choice or by chance);
3. Global and local demographic changes;
4. The end of neoliberal political-economic globalization and the ascendancy of neotraditional local ways and means; and
5. The decline of science-based information/knowledge societies and the rise of make-belief dream societies (with varying labels).
So how do the articles in this issue of Compass stack up against that yardstick? To be sure, I may be completely wrong about the centrality of these five issues for anticipating the futures usefully.
It is also necessary to recognize that because the papers are brief, no topic can be discussed fully. So, take my comments with big grains of polyunsaturated salt:
1. There is only one essay that I believe at least mentions four of the five trends seriously, with no consideration of the fifth: “Election 2024: A Futurist Perspective on Civic Culture, Mass Psychology, and Collective Futurism,” by Langdon Morris. It is unique in its emphasis on political trends.
2. Seven essays consider the transformation of work seriously via AI and automation, but do not mention the other four factors of my concern.
Devin Fidler’s article, “10 Critical Concepts to Track the Ongoing Disruption of Information Work,” traces the evolution of information and information work, and discusses the possible impact of digital technologies on work now. He suggests that the nature of these technologies is such that “self-driving organizations are only a matter of time,” which seems like a substantial step towards the end of work to me. “We Need to Begin Redefining Human Roles for a Heavily Automated World” is Fidlerʻs 10th point. Fidler also insists that we need to address “the disruption by design,” rather than continuing to drift towards dangerous impacts of unemployment, in order to minimize damage and misery — and ensure that impacts are shared equitably — a point that has animated my concern from the beginning as well, though I see little attention toward such design now.
Richard Yonck’s article, “Challenging Our Narratives About the Future of Work,” focuses elegantly on the impact of automation and AI on work. While acknowledging they may have significant consequences, he is far more sanguine (and expert) than I am, pointing out that typically new technological and social developments historically have been lamented as ending work, while work has just persisted, changed, and moved on. That may be, but I maintain that each step along the way has in fact required fewer and fewer people working, mentally as well as manually, and has been dealt with in different ways, almost always causing far more pain than necessary. The past transitions could have been planned and guided, lessening human misery. And we should be planning for full unemployment now as a goal, as I (and perhaps Fidler) believe, but certainly are not. I may be a stick-in-the-mud Johnny One Note, but I see no reason at all to change my tune.
In “A View from Silicon Valley: The Future of the Employer-Employee Relationship,” Sara Fogarty devotes a paragraph to AI, stating, “Personally, I am excited to shed work that is time consuming and unfulfilling to AI. Humans were not created to do repetitive tasks.”
In her article, “How to Use Strategic Foresight to Formulate Your Organization’s Digital Strategy in Four Easy Steps,” Samista Jugwanth optimistically suggests that “digital tools and technologies provide the agility and adaptability required to navigate such an environment.” I entirely agree with this perspective. One of the reasons I am so optimistic about the future is that AI and AI/robotically augmented humans (aka cyborgs or androids) are emerging that can help humans understand and solve a multitude of environmental, technological, and social challenges that seem to render mere humanity helpless and hopeless.
Similarly, Khalil Zafar’s article, “Driven Decision-Making of the Future: Forecast, Implementation and Challenges,” suggests that even though “seldom in the course of history has a technology had as much impact on the corporate sector, Artificial Intelligence” will enable better and faster decisions, while not necessarily disrupting existing processes, or causing significant unemployment.
Ashley Chiarelli’s article, “The Future of Knowledge Work and ‘Place,’” devotes two paragraphs to AI and automation suggesting that its impact probably wonʻt be disruptive on knowledge work.
In “Identifying Priorities for the Future of Work Through an Occupational Safety and Health Lens,” authors Jessica MK Streit and Jay Vietas, discuss aspects of AI, robotics, demographics, and technology generally, but conclude that “based on past trends, it seems safe to assume technological advancements will create new jobs over time (Mokyr et al., 2015). However, increasing applications of technology may also eliminate or redesign some jobs, reduce job quality and stability, or even change the way entire industries operate."
3. Very surprisingly, only two papers mention climate change.
Vinny Tafuro’s article, “The Future of Work: A CLA Contrast and Scenario,” states that “the world’s contemporary economic systems are in crisis. Environmental destruction and climate change threaten natural and human habitats....” “Mainstream economics provides no path forward without expanding the concept of work beyond the limits of fiscal capital.” The article, devoted to CLA as the way to find a path towards a preferred future, offers no further elaboration on environmental destruction, and doesnʻt mention AI and automation at all.
“Re-working the Future: Insights and Strategies for Building Enterprises in the 21st Century,” by Marina Gorbis, mentions climate change in passing and calls attention to “a new digital economy that is fundamentally transforming — and often degrading — our relationship to work.”
4. While two essays do not mention any of the five drivers, they do discuss two other factors that I think could be used to deal with the five.
Joshua Barthel and Dan Fukushima discuss the role of learning in “Lifelong Learning: The Disruption Vaccine,” — certainly a big part of achieving and thriving in a world of full unemployment.
On the other hand, though contrary to the authorʻs intention, from “Preparing Gen Z for the Workplace of Today and Tomorrow,” by Jacob Morgan, I conclude that Gen Zʻs antipathy towards work may have prepared them for a world of full unemployment, and that we old Protestant Work Ethic futs might seek to learn from them.
5. The remaining seven articles do not mention the five drivers at all.
Concluding observations:
Though many of the articles speak of disruption, novelty, and even transformation lying ahead, it is almost entirely within a worldview that is quite familiar to everyone now.
Only one future is considered seriously — Grow (though many challenges that must be overcome to keep growing are mentioned).
There is no use of any alternative futures method. “The (R)evolution of the Office Workplace,” by Claus Sneppen sketches four mini-scenarios of office work influenced by digitization and individualization as the two drivers progress through five time periods from 2019 to the “far future.”
No consideration of collapse of anything from any cause. No consideration of something other than economic growth being the central purpose of society and peoples’ lives.
In as much as increasingly dramatic climate change is fully revealing itself to everyone every day, I am stunned, chagrined, perplexed, horrified that no one seems to think it will alter life and work and indeed threaten survival, with or without the existence of AI, artilects, and cyborgs.
I may be weird, but am I totally nuts?
James Allen (Jim) Dator is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Core Lecturer, Space Humanities, International Space University, Strasbourg, France; Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of Futures Strategy, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Daejeon, Korea, and former President, World Futures Studies Federation. He also taught at Rikkyo University (Tokyo, for six years), the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the InterUniversity Consortium for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.
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