Working Futures, An Anthology Of Speculative Fiction About The Future Of Work

I'm excited to announce that next week we'll be releasing a project that we've been working on for almost two years, since its original conception: Working Futures, an anthology of speculative fiction about the future of work. A year and a half ago, we asked folks here to help out and participate in a survey that would help us in working through a longer process to get people to better think about what the future of work might look like. As we noted then, there are plenty of reasonable concerns about the future of jobs and employment and, to date, there have mainly been two responses from people, neither of which has been particularly satisfying. There are those who've insisted that the future will be terrible and all the jobs will be automated away and we'll have a vast hellscape remaining, and those who insist that these things generally work themselves out... but who never seem to provide any specifics.

We wanted to see what would happen if we tried to bridge that gap, by combining the expertise of people who have spent lots of time thinking about the implications of technology and work, with that of science and speculative fiction writers who specialize in crafting narratives about these kinds of future issues. To do this, we went through a long but fun process to generate interesting near-future speculative fiction over this question. The end result of this is the book to be released next week, Working Futures.

Rather than just tossing it out to science fiction writers, we wanted to involve a variety of different experts in the process to keep things within a reasonable sphere. The process was as follows:

1. We started with an online survey, to get a sense of both what driving forces people thought would be the most likely to impact the future of work, and which ones would also have the most impact. We got over 1,000 responses to our survey, which allowed us to create a scenario planning "game" out of a special deck of cards.
2. We invited about 50 people to an event in San Francisco, with a diverse range of interests, expertise and backgrounds -- including technologists, labor activists, investors, philanthropists, journalists, entrepreneurs, writers, designers and more, and we used our card deck to do a modified version of traditional scenario planning, to look at a bunch of potential futures.
3. Out of this day-long event, we generated 10 futuristic possible scenarios. It's important to note that none of these are predictions. Scenario planning is not in the business of predicting the future, but merely figuring out what possible futures are plausible, so that people can begin to think through the consequences of them, as well as understand what leading indicators there might be that we're heading in one direction or another. Most scenario planning exercises generate between 3 and 5 scenarios. We ended up with 10, because the focus of this project was a bit more broad than in traditional scenario planning.
4. We then took our packet of 10 scenarios and handed them off to a bunch of science fiction authors, with a call to submit speculative fiction short stories inspired by the scenarios. To be clear, we told them they could take loose inspiration from the scenarios, rather than having to follow any of them exactly, and left it open to them to pick and choose what they wanted from the scenarios.
5. Out of all that, we ended up commissioning and agreeing to publish 14 total stories (to be fair, two of them are my own stories), all of which, in some way or another, touch on the future of work. The book (in both ebook and paperback format) will be available starting next week, at which point, we'll make the special scenario planning card deck we created available as well, so you can create your own scenarios too.

We've been working on this project for a very long time and are excited to finally get the result into people's hands -- and to give you a taste, below this post, we've got a portion of one of the stories in the book, Ross Pruden's A Quiet Lie. If you want to see what happens, you'll have to get the whole book...

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