What You May Need to Know about the future of work from articles by Richard Branson, Richard Florida, Clare Cain Carter, and Vivek Wadhwa

We’re heading into a jobless future -

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/upshot/how-technology-aided-by-recession-is-transforming-the-work-world.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

 “The only solution that I see is a shrinking work week. We may perhaps be working for 10 to 20 hours a week instead of the 40 for which we do today. And with the prices of necessities and of what we today consider luxury goods dropping exponentially, we may not need the entire population to be working. There is surely a possibility for social unrest because of this; but we could also create the utopian future we have long dreamed of, with a large part of humanity focused on creativity and enlightenment.
Regardless, at best we have another 10 to 15 years in which there is a role for humans.”

Richard Branson – The Way you Work is Going to Change - http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/the-way-you-work-is-going-to-change

As Google’s Larry Page and others have said, the amount of jobs available for people is going to decrease as technology advances. New innovations will drive industries forward, but they will also reduce our reliance on people power. Ideas such as driverless cars and drones are becoming a reality, and machines will be used for more and more jobs in the future. Who knows, maybe even pilot-less planes, could become reality one day!
On the face of it, this sounds like bad news for people. However, if governments and businesses are clever, the advance of technology could actually be really positive for people all over the world. It could help accelerate the marketplace to much smarter working practices.The idea of working five days a week with two day weekends and a few weeks of annual holiday is just something people accept. For some reason, it is considered set in stone by most companies. There is no reason this can’t change. In fact, it would benefit everyone if it did. With the rise of flexible working – something we fully embrace at Virgin – people already have more options on how, when and where they work. I believe this will progress further in the years to come.  Many people out there would love three day or even four day weekends. There are many people out there who would want to job share, and would love longer holidays. Everyone would welcome more time to spend with their loved ones, more time to get fit and healthy, more time to explore the world. 

Richard Florida – The Atlantic - http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/building-americas-third-great-job-machine/238316/

The first American job machine was organized around farms and agricultural employment. More than four in 10 Americans worked on farms in 1800. Another 20 percent or so worked in manufacturing.The second great American job machine took hold during the mid-19^th century, propelled by the surge in manufacturing.  By late in the century, some 60 percent of the workforce had been absorbed in industrial jobs while agricultural work dropped to roughly ten percent of employment. Industrial and blue-collar manufacturing jobs would power America's economic and employment growth for the better part of the next century, until roughly1950. But for most of those years, it was low-wage, long-day, dirty and dangerous work -- it wasn't until the Great Depression, the New Deal, and post WW II prosperity that blue-collar jobs became good, family supporting jobs.America -- along with the rest of the advanced nations -- is now in the early throes of a third great economic transformation and a third great job machine.  Against the backdrop of a massive decline in once high-paying blue collar manufacturing jobs which is eerily similar to the decline of agricultural jobs a century or so ago, this third transformation is creating not one overall, but two distinct categories of jobs and employment.The first category includes millions of the best jobs America has ever seen: high-pay, high-skill jobs in knowledge-based professional and creative fields. Almost a third of American workers now have these kinds of jobs, which pay more than double most manufacturing jobs and which have been rather impervious to unemployment. When unemployment among production workers climbed to more than 15 percent and surged above 20 percent for construction workers, unemployment among professional, technical and creative workers never got much above five percent.But the second category, which comprises such routine service work as personal care assistants and home health care aids, retail sales clerks, and food preparers -- is not so good. In fact, the pay for these jobs is roughly half that of manufacturing jobs. The result is as simple as it is tragic: a startling bifurcation of the job market and an increasingly unequal and divided society. Once we see this, it becomes clear that neither of the two most commonly cited prescriptions -- the counter-cyclical approach to job creation by boosting investment and demand, or the path of educating more people for higher-paying knowledge-based jobs -- can work.[CC1] This wouldn't come for free. All of us would have to pay a little more to the people who clean our homes, take care of our kids and aging parents, cut our hair, and sell us our clothes. This is exactly what we did a half century ago to spur recovery, when we agreed to pay more to the workers who made our cars and appliances and were building our homes. The costs are so modest and widely spread that they are unlikely to derail any recovery. And the payoffs in terms of productivity gains and increased demand are surely worth it.

Vivek Wadhwa – The Scary and Amazing Future of Work - http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/11/18/the-scary-and-amazing-future-of-work/

A decade ago, we could not have imagined being always on, always connected, with work following us wherever we go. 

For our grandparents, “work” was almost always in a factory or on a farm. Today, the farm and factory jobs are performed by a shrinking minority. There are still many jobs in the services sector that require physical work. But increasingly our workforce is performing tasks that are done with the mind—that require knowledge and skill. These knowledge jobs can be assisted by technology.