Future of Work

At this summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, I had the great pleasure of facilitating a conversation with four Ideas Fest Fellows — young leaders in the fields of media, philanthropy, and economic policy — about their view of the future of work.

According to Brunswick Group’s latest research, the traditional playbook for engaging working-class workers—especially younger ones—is rapidly becoming obsolete.

The retirement landscape is at a critical juncture, and it’s created a global opportunity — and responsibility — for us all. Evolving workplace retirement plans, increasing longevity, and changing workforce dynamics create even more demand for secure investment products and lifetime income solutions. Through hybrid approaches, innovative financial products, and a focus on financial education, we can ensure that the future of work includes the future-ready resources that people need to live better lives, longer.

In this conversation with Economic Opportunities Program Executive Director Maureen Conway, Padhi explores the massive potential of scaling technology and generative artificial intelligence (AI) and where many companies have fallen short of realizing these benefits.

How will artificial intelligence (AI) impact the workplace? To answer that, we must have a much clearer sense of what AI is. In the most basic sense, AI is software — powerful software. It uses a mix of code and layers of other software programs that have already run trillions of calculations on existing text and images to generate predictions. AI uses these calculated responses to spit out pretty good answers to almost any prompt asked of it. Think of it as a cross between a web search and the person at work who has an answer for anything — whether they know the right answer or not. It is built to mansplain with certainty.

In this conversation, we explore what the past can teach us about the future — and how we can ensure that workers have a say in what comes next.

How do we think about cities, states, and municipalities as sites of experimentation and contestation for new models of workers co-designing technology initiatives with employers?