Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The 100-year life: reframing longevity as a gift

Sometimes the future doesn’t turn out as you had predicted. Whatever happened to Second Life and the avatars that I – and thousands of others – created? And let’s face it, Uber caught most of us by surprise – and yet now we have no qualms getting into a stranger's car. Sometimes the future hurtles in unexpected directions, and we just have to learn to catch up.

In some cases, however, the signs are there for all to see. Yet we just don’t notice them, or we misinterpret them. The future creeps up on us. For me, longevity falls into this category. 

Longevity: a creeping curse?

I’ve been studying the trends that will shape the future of work and living for decades. I’ve written about technology and societal trends and the impact of globalization and have certainly always been peripherally aware of demographic trends. I’d seen the inverted age pyramid of Japan and knew that more than a quarter of the country’s population is over the age of 65. Initially, I interpreted this primarily as an issue of ageing, the last decade of life, and of pension provision. I’d seen this demographic data as a curse – when life elongates surely that just means more years of ageing diseases such as Alzheimer’s? It was not something I particular wanted to think about, to study or to write about.

What changed, was that my colleague Andrew Scott and I began to talk more about these demographic trends – and as we did so, we began to reframe the trend data. In fact, rather than looking only at the last decades of life, we began instead to see that longevity impacts on every stage of life. Once you reframe in this way the trend data is extraordinary. Imagine that for every year of life, life expectancy increases by three months. Most of us will live significantly longer than our parents, and right now many babies born today are expected to live for at least 100 years.

The implications are that across the space of the next two generations, individuals, institutions and governments will have to accommodate to two, possibly three more decades of life – and that’s what really caught our attention.

Reframing longevity as a gift

Andrew and I are both academics – he an economist, I a psychologist. The way we normally study the world is by looking at it closely. But how many people currently have lived to 100 years, and can their life experience really tell us much about the future?

So rather than observing what we can see around us now, we decided to project into the future. To do this we took one young woman, whom we called Jane, and built for her a series of scenarios about how she could live the rest of her 100-year life. As we built Jane’s life story, we began to reframe longevity as a gift rather than a curse, focusing on how she could live in a productive and happy way. Our aim was to explore what her possible future lives could be and to play out the consequences of the decisions she might make at various points in her life.

Building these scenarios was fascinating. It taught us a lot of things, which we were eager to share. That’s why we wrote The 100-year Life: living and working in the age of longevity. We believe the conversation about longevity is crucial - and that every one of us needs to re-learn how we plan our lives and our careers.

To learn more about what it takes to live a long and productive life, visit our website at www.100yearlife.com and pre-order the book.

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How Will Japanese Corporations Address their Ageing Workforce?

9 Reasons Robots are Distorting our View of the Future

There are acres of books, innumerable conferences and endless press speculation about the rise of the robot. We first witnessed IBM’s Big Blue defeat Jeopardy contestants and then go on to beat chess masters. But, we thought, robots can’t do easy stuff like walking up stairs – until we sat bewitched by the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot which can positively scamper over obstacles. And to cap it all economists are reminding us that within the next decade up to 60% of jobs could be lost to advances in machine learning and robotics.

So it’s no surprise that when we let our minds speculate about the future we become fixated by the rise of the machines. We imagine that over the coming decades those wizards in Silicon Valley will be pumping out a continuous supply of technological products that will perform tasks we didn’t even know we needed and, as a result, we frame the future in terms of our consumption of these delights.

Speculations about the future are something I have been transfixed by as Andrew Scott and I have written our book The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. When we all live longer, then the context of these longer lives becomes fascinating.

But as we imagine the future, should we let technological developments be the major framing? It seems to me that this obsession about our robotic future is missing the point, and at a lecture given this week by Judy Wajcman, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, I began to understand why – summarised here in nine bite-sized thoughts:

1. It’s a geek's view of the world. Those wizards in Silicon Valley and other technological hot spots around the world are a homogenous bunch. They are mostly male, in their 30s, deeply into gaming and technology from childhood and often introvert. So as with any homogenous group, they are likely to view the world and the future through their own lens.
2. It’s hard technological determinism. The result of this is the notion that somehow technology just develops and we humans have little impact on the velocity or speed of this development.
3. It’s myopic. This single lens perspective leaves a great deal of the story untold. Five hundred years ago Thomas More wrote Utopia in which he described an imagined island community. He described their practices of engagement and marriage, their celebrations of life and death, and their laws and ways of living. His was a much richer and interesting view of the future.
4. Images of the future leave women out. Well not quite – would the technology films Ex Machina or Her work if the robot or operating system was a man? So this technological future casts women in a certain role. But as inventors or creators or imaginers of the future - women are almost absent.
5. It is ambivalent about time. So here is the paradox. Most machines are there to provide us with the gift of time and yet the technologies we create are the very same that seem to rob our time. Is the future really 300 emails a day, and is the only way out of this a cleverer machine?
6. It takes away human resolve. Rather than imagining we are the central players in this vision of the future, we seem instead to be playing a walk on part unable to make our needs and hopes and aspirations felt.
7. We see ourselves as hostages to the machines. And by doing so we focus on what we have lost (jobs, peace of mind) rather than what we could gain in the future.
8. It reduces the big questions. As we try to frame the future and prepare for it, it seems to me that Thomas More was right – the big questions are about how we want to live with each other, what our communities could look like, what it is we value, how we might think about what we want to tell our children. So surely our questions about the future should center as much on this as on the technology?
9. It makes us less human. In a world where technology has reduced some of our more onerous tasks (imagine life without a washing machine) surely our conversations should be about what makes us more human – how the future could be about creativity, innovation, intuition.

Perhaps now, in the year of the anniversary of More’s Utopia, it is time to re-imagine our future in its totality, embracing families and communities, work and rituals.