Wired Magazine : The Future of Work

For many years at Microsoft I focused on our Information Worker solutions that were intiatally inspired by and soon thereafter fully based on a vision on the New World of Work.

This morning I receveid the editor’s email form from Wired Magazine highlighting ‘The Future of Work’; eight fiction stories written by science fiction writers … How cool is that !

Maria Streshinsky, Executive Editor, WIRED writes :

I love it when my colleagues prove me wrong. Earlier this year, at one of our regular meetings to discuss story ideas, editors Sarah Fallon and Jason Kehe suggested doing a package of stories on the Future of Work. Then, just as the grizzled, cynical editors—ok, I was the only one—started to groan about how there wasn’t too much new to say about automation changing the landscape, the two of them cut me off, with gusto: “No. Wait.” The WIRED way, they said, was not to analyze the stats again, but to imagine what that future will look like, will feel like. And, they argued, who better to do the imagining than science fiction writers? Woah. Ok cool, we thought, let’s do this. Jason and Sarah set off, gathered co-conspirators in the office, and started daydreaming about the best writers for the task.

When the drafts of the “Future of Work” fiction stories arrived, we were delighted at their ingenuity: Charlie Jane Anders writes about the news organization of the future. “Once, The Daily Argus had fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers. Those people are gone now, and in their place there’s the Farm: a virtual machine populated with copies of a few trillion different bots.” Their provocativeness: Martha Wells’ first line, in her story Compulsory is “It’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module.” And their wonderful relatable weirdness: Laurie Penny writes about a boy who finds work as a female bot for lonelyhearts.

Check out the eight stories @ WIRED : 8 Sci-Fi Writers Imagine the Bold and New Future of Work