221: The Future of Work. Workplace Science. Rethinking Recruiting and the Resume. The Automated Workforce. Live/work Homestead Design. The Information Economy.
This week on Spark - a look at the future of work. We'll explore which careers may one day be automated, check out some inventive ideas for how a post-automation economy would work, and talk about why it's time to rethink the resume, hiring, and recruiting in an age of lifelong learning.
Just click the Listen button, or click here to download the mp3.
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Workforce Science
Vivienne Ming on the new field of workforce science, and using big data in place of traditional hiring methods to shape the future of job recruiting.
Related Links
The New Resume
Christopher Kennedy thinks the traditional resume is no longer an effective tool for showing off who you are and the work you do, now that work is increasingly freelance and project based.
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The Automated Workforce
Martin Ford with a look at how the free market would function in a future where automation and computers replace a significant fraction of the workforce.
Related Links
- Martin Ford
- Martin's book The Lights in the Tunnel
- Full Spark interview with Martin Ford
- Check out these other Spark stories about jobs that humans can do that computers can't: The Most Human Human, Rage Against the Machine, and White Collar Robots.
Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier believes that our digital economy is stamping out middle class jobs, and he has solutions for a new information economy that will help stabilize it.
Related Links
- Jaron Lanier
- Jaron's book Who owns the Future?
Rural Futures
Ben Falk on modern-day homesteading - planning self-sustaining plots of land to both live and work on.
Related Links
We Also Talked About...Surveillance
Recently, we've seen waves of information about the surveillance of digital communication, from news that CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada) has a "secret metadata eavesdropping program" to news about the US government's PRISM program.
Shortly before the story about PRISM broke, Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, talked about the increasing use of government surveillance online and the so-called "securitization" of cyberspace. You can hear the full interview here.
One important aspect of the CSEC news is the concept of collecting "metadata" - data about the data. Typical examples of communications metadata are things like dates and times of phone calls, who was being called, IP addresses associated with internet activity, and so on. (We don't know what types of metadata CSEC collects). How much can metadata reveal? Back in 2010, we talked to Valdis Krebs about the use of 'network analysis', which makes use of metadata, about the potential, but also the dangers of this kind of analysis.