My latest guest post for the ITU is now online:  ITU WORLD BLOG | The concept of work as we know it is toast. I am, btw, posting on the ITU blog because of my involvement with the ITU's Telecom World Leadership Summit for the Future, which I am curating as well as moderating (Dec 7, 2014, in Doha).

Some curated snippets:

Whether you live to work or work to live, for the vast majority of people throughout the world having a job of some sort is central to the way our lives are structured. So what happens when the drones and the robots take over? This is not a facetious question, nor a piece of science fiction. The impact of artificial intelligence and smart devices is clear: many jobs as we know them will be taken over by advances in automation, in particular those repetitive, lower skilled or less creative tasks where human skills such as negotiation and creativity are not needed…The impact on our economic systems of the future may be dramatic. Within thirty or forty years, the concept of work and working for a living as we know it now will be over: toast. In addition, developments in artificial intelligence are increasingly producing self-learning machines that simply need more processing power to continue advancing exponentially – possibly, and in the worst of scenarios, to a point beyond our control, where we as humans are merely troublesome, inefficient concepts in a machine world… MORE

Gerd Leonhard ITU WORLD BLOG | The concept of work as we know it is toast PDF version