The office or the workplace has generally been the same forever – a desk and a chair. Whether its ‘your’ desk and chair, a hot desk, an agile environment, a sit stand desk, a kitchen table at home or in a high rise in the middle of the city – we all use them everywhere.
There are many variations and styles of desks and chairs, just Google ‘office chair’ and you will find approximately 43 million results. But according to Max Tegmark, author of the recent book – Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the future is shaping up fast to be something very different.
When listening to Max speak recently in London, I mused at how similar most offices and workplaces are, but thought what about the future? His perspective of the future could mean the workplace looks very different. AI has started by taking muscle jobs, but is fast moving to taking brain jobs. Muscle jobs didn’t effect the desk and chair. We still sit on chairs and work at desks even though millions around the world have lost their muscle jobs to AI on the factory floors and manufacturing plants.
But AI is moving extremely fast into brain jobs; many US large employers know they have huge social and economic decisions to make. Will they retire humans for more efficient machines and if they do what responsibilities do they have for the effects on the hundreds or thousands of workers, their families and communities that no longer have purpose in work?
For RAW Brothers, a creative consultancy that help provide environments for people to work, these are fascinating and thoroughly relevant developments. Why would we keep inventing and reinventing offices, desk and chairs if they may not be the right thing for the future, the very near future?