“The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!”

Some version of that hyperbolic headline appears near daily as journalists, pundits, scholars, and politicians, among others, struggle to make sense of a world in the midst of digital transformation. The stories often paint a dystopian scene where automation displaces workers and humans become the subjects of their smarter AI overlords. One pundit once told an audience of academics and executives that with the digital transformation complete, the only jobs left would be “oiling the robots.” We chuckled at the thought, realizing that oiling the robots is a task so utterly routine and predictable that surely another robot could do it. We aren't alone in our skepticism. American scholar and organizational consultant Warren Bennis is reported to have said in the 1990s, “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

This view of work after robots, though, entirely lacks imagination.

In fact, that lazy summation is exactly how we started the conversation that led to this book. We met at an innovation conference that seemed to us steeped in fear of technology and its power to disrupt our lives. Coming at the topic from different directions, we agreed then and still believe that the idea that technology will take down humans is, in a word, absurd. Autodesk's Mickey McManus puts it better than we could: “Humans are what we call passionate, but passionate is such a weak word. Humans can't help themselves. Humans riff on stuff. Humans putter and create. They can't be stopped.”

As long as there has been work, which is to say always, humans have fashioned tools to make that work easier, safer, and more productive. We have ceded the heavy lifting to machines, off-loaded memory to recordings, and delegated calculations to computers. Yet there are still plenty of jobs. There may be little demand for stagecoach drivers, blacksmiths, buggy whip makers, or boilermakers, but there is so much else that needs doing. And there always will be.

So, we end this book much where we started it.

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished,” we quoted psychologist Dan Gilbert as saying in the introduction to this book. Observing the “ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining,” he continues, “most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. When people say, ‘I can't imagine that,’ they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.”¹

The world is changing, and fast. It is hard to imagine. We will change, too. The work we do and the way we do it will differ almost from day to day. It will always be easier to look back and remember than it will be to look forward and imagine. That practice of looking back and forward, and it is a practice, is incredibly intimidating when you are tightly bolted to a professional identity that measures how you walk in the world. On the other hand, it's incredibly exciting to imagine a future of work that lets us explore why we walk in the world.

When we talked with neuroscientist Vivienne Ming, she reminded us that nurturing the emotional, social, and creative skills at the center of a new digital economy takes courage. She sees a schism opening between what she and others call the creative economy and the service economy. As we transition from the Third to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, many people have moved into the service economy, unprepared to participate in the creative economy. No doubt, some of those service jobs are rewarding pathways to career success by many measures, and we need to value those roles in service to one another. Too many service-sector jobs, though, are way stations for automation with paychecks that will never match union jobs in manufacturing. Or, as Ming puts it, the service economy is that work that is “not worth building a robot to do because, frankly, humans are cheaper. It's low autonomy, it's low meaningfulness.”

The creative economy, on the other hand, requires more and different education and learning. The creative economy, Ming says, is all about exploring the unknown, learning and creating pathways to new value. Then, she adds, “I think our mission in the world should be: How can we pull as many people as is imaginable into the creative economy?”

We agree. Still, we can only pull those willing to let go. That's the first step. Then, free from the anchor of a fixed identity, we can seize our adaptation advantage and learn fast and thrive in the future of work. It may be helpful, then, to think of education an as investment in your future value. In that context, learning becomes the new pension, accruing value all along the arc of your career.

We crafted this book for you from thousands of conversations, as brief as a Twitter chat or as deep as an after-dinner debate. We hope the conversation continues with you. Please share your story with us on Twitter: @AdaptationAdva1. We can't promise to answer every message, but we do guarantee that when you do get a response, it won't be from a robot.

—Chris and Heather