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:

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...

Source: Techdirt.com

Powered by NewsAPI.org

Keywords:

Concept • Futures studies • Speculative fiction • Survey methodology • Scientific method • Reason • Time • Technology • Science • Speculative fiction • Literature • Craft • Narrative • Scientific method • Future • Speculative fiction • Book • Week • Futures studies • Science fiction • Scientific method • Object (philosophy) • Reason • Scientific method • Lie • Holism •