IDEA: WORK TOURISM

Work can be a burden and a platform for exploitation.

What if we chose to structure work as means to self-expression, cultural exploration and discovery?

Imagine a scenario where someone turning the corner to adulthood seeking direction and opportunity finds a clear pathway to learning new skills while also exploring new global communities. Businesses and governments, our primary avenues of employment, could provide a structure similar to a college curriculums that help job prospects navigate an array of global choices with a relevant learning outcome attached to each term of employment.

For example, I could take a job with McDonald’s in France and learn about French culture and global supply distribution. Employers will need to stop viewing employees as generic pools of value extraction, treating them as costs to be managed. Rather focus on the potential individuals to develop new attitudes and capabilities over time. Imagine a world where we share the burden of labor to explore new experiences, learn new skills, and contribute to sustaining the human race—this is the future of work. To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Labor can truly evolve from being a burden of existence to becoming a path toward personal and social transcendence. We simply need to craft the experience of our work in an equitable and participatory way.

So how would this work?

This future of work lies at the intersection of several forces: alternative currencies, knowledge work, innovation communities, and amusement parks. To bring these forces together, every job must adopt the “learn by doing” model. Work must become theater. Technology can help us intertwine labor and learning in new ways, but we have not exploited this symbiotic relationship enough. Labor transcendence will emerge through the introduction of knowledge acquisition and entertainment into all aspects of our work; when labor is rooted in learning about the world and the effects of human intervention, it is no longer normalized and repetitive. We must overlap knowledge domains with relative categories of work, making labor meaningful to the individual while also adding social value through workers who are cognizant of their contribution. Consider the following models for transcendent labor, in which newly acquired skills could be traded on a global time-sharing marketplace:

Warehouse associate with cybernetics. Laborers in modern fulfillment centers are forced to operate at the cadence of their automated and robot partners, and eventually will be replaced by them. The warehouse associates of the future could learn how their robot partners are maintained and become knowledgeable about their construction and mechanics, which would result in a labor force of skilled robotic engineers.

Plumbing with civil engineering and water conservation. People laboring on the smaller end points of our broader infrastructure could understand the systemic implications of their decisions (for example, total water wasted due to loose fittings). Through these systemic insights, they could learn how systems behave from the bottom up and use this information to augment sensor data that exists on newer Internet of Things plumbing systems.

Childcare with evolutionary psychology. The babysitter with knowledge of Jean Piaget’s “stages of cognitive development” could capture valuable data at scale, which could be shared anonymously through a system like PatientsLikeMe. This would provide new insights into childhood development at the societal level and could also have profound effects on how individual childcare laborers parent in the future.

Service and hospitality with art and design. Hospitality is centered on presentation and aesthetics. People in the hospitality industry should be trained in aesthetics, craftsmanship, and theater in order to understand the artistry inherent in daily life. With this training, they could create expressions that articulate our day-to-day experiences in ways we never considered.

End-of-life care with metaphysics. Palliative care work is challenging, but many consider it rewarding. Future generations of people who choose to do this work should have access to information and philosophies that could provide context to their experiences. These mental tools could provide a framework for these laborers to share with society their insights into the questions of life and death.

Rethinking how we work means reframing the reasons why we work. We need a new framework to understand how skills relate to job tasks. We also need to understand the personal goals and motivations of the laborer in order to provide a meaningful development path. Technology can open the door to human transcendence, primarily by satisfying our needs through technological breakthroughs in food production, computation, and materials—all derived from the fruits of our labor. In this future, technology offers the option to redefine what we call work.

Ideas from the deep shallow are focused on ethical human momentum, proposing a possible course of actions, intent on the equitable advancement of all peoples. Our ideas are open source and available to any entities, brands or organizations eager and courageous enough to take them into development. Ideas are nothing without the people who make them happen and the people who support their adoption. See our terms of service for further details.