Konica Minolta Unveils the Future of Work, Or At Least Its Version

Spotlight Live kicked off with a brief introduction from BBC Click’s Spencer Kelly, where he outlined Konica Minolta’s Future of Work Manifesto. This covered things like connected devices, connected automation, and machine learning. But soon he was replaced by the headline act – author Douglas Coupland. This is the guy credited with popularising the phrase “Generation X”, with his 1991 novel of the same name.

As a famous analyst of working trends, Douglas Coupland was the perfect choice for Spotlight Live’s keynote speaker, although he seemed a little uncomfortable reading from a teleprompter to begin with. He started off decrying how the sense of life being a story had been eroded by recent trends, asking “how do you find a meaningful life where anything is everything is anywhere?” He argued that we have lost our privacy, and become characterised by our schizophrenia.

One of the key defining factors of our age is ubiquitous connectivity, and Coupland cited the situation where rural China getting broadband as good as Manhattan. The Chinese see the future as digital, and intend to get get there first.

 
But Coupland did see the more fluid workday allowed by ubiquitous connectivity as potentially a boon, because the rigidity of 9 to 5 was barbaric. On the other hand, it's clear that we now have more people with fewer things to do, and our view of work could be changing.

He cited Greece as a case in point, where doing nothing was contrasted with having nothing to do. How do you allow people dignity when the jobs disappear, and will there really be exciting new jobs to replace the ones that technological advances render obsolete?

Referring to the Silicon Valley trend towards “work at home Wednesdays”, Coupland argued that in the future every day of the week will be a Wednesday. This would lead to a global monoclass instead of the middle class that has defined modernity for the last few centuries.

The survivors are likely to be people who actually have a skill. The future could be great, but the new poverty would be lack of WiFi rather than money. The impact of connectivity was so significant that maybe there wouldn't be anything more significant for some time to come.

Coupland concluded that the office of the future would revolve around the needs of the individual. But he wasn't left with the last word on that, because next up was a panel discussion with six experts on the emerging world of digital work.

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