Futurama: Debating The Workplace of Tomorrow ... With The Workers of Tomorrow

David Greenwald of UCLA Magazine wondered what the workplace of the future will look like. So, he turned to the experts -- the faculty at UCLA Anderson -- and those with the most at stake -- the students at the UCLA Lab School and UCLA Community school. 

Greenwald spoke with lecturer Jonathan Greenblatt, UCLA Anderson Forecast Senior Economist Jerry Nickelsburg and Professor Barbara Lawrence. Greenblatt told Greenwald that he doesn't necessarily turn to books or scholars when contemplating the future, rather he consults his seven-year-old son Ilan 'who envisions a future where workers will continue to go to offices, but 'sometimes in meetings people will use holograms to talk to each other.'" Greenblatt also shared his concerns about social networking, wondering if they will "further enmesh people in a loop of constant engagement, 'collapsing the walls that once neatly separated our cubicles from our kitchens, our professional and personal lives. Everything will be in the open, everyone will be 'on' and everywhere will be your 'office.''"

While Greenblatt wondered about collapsing social boundaries, Lawrence (pictured above at left) considered the "boundaryless career." "The basic premise is that more and more people will create their own careers outside of traditional organizational boundaries, taking their skill sets across organizations, occupations and industries," she told Greenwald. "People won't get stuck in organizations in positions where they feel they have no future. Moreover, they become independent of an organization's promotion, hiring and layoff decisions. The ideal boundaryless career allows an individual to decide for him or herself what 'career' means."

For their part, the kids Greenwald spoke with understand as well as the Anderson experts that technology will influence their careers and workplace settings. Some believe robots will replace human workers for some jobs (a view shared by Nickelsburg's UCLA Forecast colleague Ed Leamer who wrote in December, "There is a long line of Robots offering to do the mundane repetitive physical tasks in manufacturing ... in the past 50 years, Robots have learned a lot, and today they can perform a great array of simple and complicated tasks, with great accuracy and worst of all, they are willing to work virtually around the clock for low pay, and they hardly care about working conditions. It's hopeless for American workers to try and compete with Robots.") while realizing, like the little girl who wants to be a writer but knows her work will appear on Kindles and not in books, that technology will enhance their future employment.

"Is it going to be robots? Is it going to be computers that run on biological systems? I have no idea," Nickelsburg muses in the article. "That's what makes the future exciting, and I hope I live long enough to see it."

The Future of Work in UCLA Magazine by David Greenwald