Work, Tech, Politics

The usual blend of blathering

Homeward Bound

I missed the BBC Panorama programme “Should We Still Be Working from Home?”, despite a few people mentioning it to me, as it clashed with my ukulele class. I was going to watch it on catch up but, having read some reviews and seen many comments on LinkedIN, I don’t think I’ll bother. (My comments are mainly based on the press reports.)

That it turned out to be a lazy rehash of the usual arguments, presenting the usual false binary, shouldn’t really be a surprise when you look at the title. It’s a real shame, though, because here was an opportunity to talk about what is undoubtedly the biggest change in work this century (so far).

On the plus side was Nick Bloom, arguably the leading authority on remote working and working from home, presenting the data showing that working from home is undoubtedly a net positive. Joeli Brearley, founder of ‘Pregnant the Screwed’ also made the case for flexible working being much needed by working mums and families generally.

On the negative side, the case against was based on opinion and anecdote and, of course, this was presented as ‘balance’. Most notable was the comments of Lord Rose that dominated the headlines of the newspaper reports. He said that it is ‘not proper work’ and was damaging productivity, and that it was contributing to the UK economy’s “general decline.” He also claimed it has ‘set the UK back 20 years’ and that the UK ‘can’t afford working from home’.

What is telling about his interview is that most of his points start with ‘I believe’ or ‘I think’. Quite what a 75-year old white man who sits in the Lords has to contribute to a discussion about today’s workplace is never really explained, so let’s try and fill that gap.

He used to run M&S and Asda, two large retail operations. Retail is less than 5% of the UK economy and employs large numbers of people on low wages, many of them women. It is hardly representative of the wider economy and particularly knowledge-based organisations (what we used to call ‘white collar workplaces’). I doubt that Lord Rose has done what most of us would recognise as ‘proper work’ for several decades, instead inhabiting the rarified atmosphere of the boardroom and executive lounges.

Still, the BBC thought he had a valid opinion to offer, even if it escapes me, so let’s examine his unevidenced contentions.

He says that working practices and productivity have regressed, and that productivity is ‘less good if you work from home’. Taking the last point first, he’s just plain wrong, as Nick Bloom demonstrates elsewhere in the programme. He doesn’t say what working practices he is referring to, so it\’s impossible to know whether he has a point of is just talking bollocks.

On productivity in general, the UK has a long-standing productivity gap with its competitors and productivity has flat-lined since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Many studies have shown that there are three main reasons for this. The biggest is a lack of investment by businesses in the UK. In addition to that are insufficient training and skills development of the UK workforce and poor management. There are many things both government and industry could and should be doing to address these. Stopping working from home is not one of them.

His most insidious comment was

“We are creating a whole generation and probably a generation beyond that of people who are used to actually not doing what I call proper work.”

As well as being the comment that dominated the reporting, it gave the Standard the opportunity to talk about ‘criticism of a “generation lazy” culture.’, which is a disgusting example of shifting blame onto the younger generation. Again, he doesn’t define what he means by ‘proper work’, so we are left no wiser but now with a nasty taste in our mouths.

To be fair (although he wasn’t), he does make a point about mental health but, typically, makes it badly. He asserts there is a connection between poor mental health and working from home, although he does at least acknowledge that this has not been proven. Indeed, it has not. In fact the opposite is true in that working from home has been shown to improve mental health, although it is a mixed picture. Undoubtedly, for some, it is a problem and this is disproportionately younger employees who lack space at home and rely on work for much of their social contact. This uneven effect is a problem to be addresses but not by dragging everyone back into the office. In any case, working from home is a net positive.

This was a wasted opportunity to inform and educate and instead the BBC seems to have taken the lazy option of a ‘Punch and Judy’ format, recycling the tired debate that has already been done to death.

Working from Home, remote working, flexible working - whatever you call it - is here to stay. It’s not a problem to be wrestled with, it’s an opportunity to be grasped. Now a programme that explored that opportunity, that’s something I might even miss my ukulele class to watch.

(Not really, I’d get it on catch up, of course!)

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

Lord Rose no doubt approves of the many Return To Office moves being announced by big companies in the USA, the likes of JP Morgan and Amazon being joined by the federal government under the new Trump administration.

These have to be seen alongside the abandonment of DEI by Facebook and, again, the US government, and the widespread use of sackings over the past 18 months (notably in Big Tech). There is a regressive wind blowing through businesses in the US that we can expect to see spread elsewhere.

But it’s not all businesses. A number of US companies have endorsed their DEI programmes, hailing them as an essential part of their business strategy and their competitive edge. (Interestingly, this group also includes JP Morgan.)

So which way are we going to go?

I think what we will see is a bifurcation of organisations.

Some organisations will pursue a regressive approach to employees and assert their power over them, more openly treating them as disposable cogs and continuing to depress salaries and wages as a means to increase profitability. This will be accompanied by aggressive substitution of employees with AI and use of outsourcing.

Others will continue to embrace the opportunities of flexible working, to value diversity and equality on their workforce, and to focus on empowering and enabling their employees to realise their potential. They will value the human contribution and will see AI as an enabling tool.

This divide is going to become clearer and starker. The regressive organisations will be incumbents who are looking to protect their market position by using their power and size. The progressive organisations will be new entrants and challengers, who see the opportunity to use new ways of working to out perform the market.

I believe the regressive organisations will go into decline, slow for many but with a few sudden collapses. The progressives will thrive and eventually displace the current leaders. What they do once they get there is a moot point, I’m not naive enough to believe they won’t then become regressive themselves, but I can hope they won’t.

Rat Trap

“Employment Is Dead” proclaim Deborah Perry Piscione and Josh Drean in their new book of the same name.

The gist of their argument (no, I haven’t read the book either. Look, it’s only just been published! And, you know, ukulele practice. Whatever.) is that new technologies like AI (of course), the metaverse and blockchain (wait, didn’t I trash those last week?) Are going to free us up from the need for employment.

OK, I could tear apart the apparent technology idealism here but a) I haven’t read the book and b) that doesn’t necessary invalidate their underlying points. They seem to be pointing to deeper trends and wants that undoubtedly will be enabled (and are being enabled) through technology, even if it’s not the shiny ones they have mentioned.

And hey, the authors are arguing for ‘more democratic, human-centric, and empowering work experiences’, which I heartily endorse, so I’m going to cut them some slack on this. Plus, as I said, I haven’t read the book, so I’m not really in a position to debunk it.

So they point to a few trends that I think are both correct and significant.

1. The failure of conventional work models to adapt and meet the evolving needs of the workforce

2. The increase in distributed work capabilities

3. The increasing use of freelancers and other outsourced resources

4. The reduction in the number of full-time salaried positions

None of these are new, although they have received fresh impetus for a variety of different reasons (not all of them positive).

What they seem to be positing is that the advances that we are seeing will equip people to craft their own careers, to design their own mix of work and plot their own development. We will be freed of the need to be employed, we won’t need to sign up for the corporate gig, because technology will enable us to create our own employment.

Or as co-author Josh Drean puts it:

‘Thanks to AI, web3, DAOs, and smart contracts, workers will have unprecedented opportunities to design their own work experiences.

✅ Mixing income streams

✅ Working for multiple organizations simultaneously

✅ Setting schedules that fit their lifestyles

Going to work could be as easy as opening an app and getting started on your own terms.’

This sounds a bit like the ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle for everyone, only without the travelling. It also sounds a bit panglossian, somewhat future optimistic.

It raises a number of questions for me.

Firstly, which workers? I can see experienced knowledge workers being able to take advantage of this opportunity, but they have long been the pioneers of new ways of working, early adopters of ‘work from anywhere’ and operating as independent businesses. You know, people like Harvard Professors who write books and doing speaking gigs. Or the authors peers, as you might say. What’s going to push this into the mainstream? What’s going to make it possble for the rest of us?

Secondly , which is more significant here, the push factor from employers wanting to reduce fixed overheads, or the pull factor from employees want more autonomy over their lives and more purpose in their work? Which way the scales fall drives the pace of change, and for whom, with quite different outcomes.

Will this just lead to increased corporate power and greater societal inequality?

Does this increase the atomisation of society and widen the gap between the winners and losers?

How do people gain the skills to do the work and develop their capabilities?

I do think we are moving in this direction, and I have long held the view that we will have ‘fluid’ careers in the future, moving in and out of different forms of employment and through different careers. However, society and government (and related policies like taxation, education and pensions) are still designed around the model of a lifetime of paid employment for most people. Without corresponding changes to those structures, this new-found freedom from employment could lead to precocity, and just ask Uber and Deliveroo drivers how that goes.

On the other hand, this could lead to much greater flexibility in the labour market (a competitive advantage for a country) and much greater choice for citizens as to how they create their career and their life. It could be an argument for strengthening the social safety net, particularly provision in areas such as health, education and pensions, so that people have the security to embrace these opportunities.

Now, there’s an enticing prospect.

It’s All Over Now

Well, after my AI scepticism of last week, I feel I have to comment on DeepSeek, the Chinese LLM (Large Language Model) announced this week and that has shaken the AI world (in Silicon Valley, at least).

If you are not aware, Deep Seek is comparable with Chat GPT but has been produced at a fraction of the cost and represents a number of breakthroughs and divergence from the ‘hyperscaler’ AI platforms (like ChatGPT).

It is open source (technically, it’s ‘open weights’ rather than full open source), which means you can see how it works and change it if you want. You can run it on your own servers (so it doesn’t sit in the cloud) and it runs on much cheaper technology than the leading LLMs. If you do use DeepSeek’s offering, it’s about 30x cheaper than Chat GPT.

And it’s open source(ish), so it means there will be lots of similar LLMs coming along now it’s been shown this is possible (they have shared how they developed it as well).

This is good news because it means that these types of AIs (LLMs) will become commodity items and cheap enough to be widely deployed, overcoming one of the issues with the current leading LLMs. We still don’t have an explanation as to WHY you’d want to deploy them as no ‘killer app’ has been identified, so whether there’s any value in deploying them widely is unclear but cost is no longer going to be a barrier.

That also means a path to profitability is now visible, although is LLMs are now a commodity product, it won’t be massive profits.

And that’s what’s shaken Silicon Valley. You see, the competition to ‘win the AI race’ was never about enhancing the human race or elevating the human existence. It was all about establishing a monopoly and then extracting monopoly profits for ever, because we’d all have to use the AI.

That’s why eye-watering sums of money have been invested in AI companies, and why even more eye-watering sums are being invested in building out data centres for the ‘compute’ power that was envisaged to be needed.

That’s why the people leading the ‘AI race’ are not the technologists but a bunch of management consultant, investment bankers and, well, tech grifters.

They thought we’d all be tied into using AI on a big platform in the cloud, hooked into them for ever. The same model that exists for social media platforms, but on steroids. The AI developers and the ‘hyperscalers’ building the ‘compute’ infrastructure (Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and the rest of Big Tech) thought the route to success (and massive profits) was through throwing staggering amounts money at building a bigger AI than anyone else. And they had more money than anyone else, so they would win.

Now it looks like we could all have our own little AI, running on our phone. Well, maybe not for a while, maybe never, but the point is that it won’t be a premium product and there won't be barriers to entry for companies that want to develop services on the AI (monopolists absolutely love barriers to entry and try to make them as high as possible). Now any scrappy start up can build the next ‘killer app’, based on AI. Big Tech, e.g. the ‘hyperscalers’, won’t get a look in.

The house of cards is facing the winds of change. We all know what happens next.

(For the avoidance of doubt, this doesn’t make me an AI evangelist. It just makes me slightly less sceptical. But you probably realised that.)

Working For The Man

It should be noted that although I’ve been taking about work, the whole conversation is underpinned by politics and economics, by power and money. The working from home ‘debate’ is a power struggle between employers and workers.

The harshening of attitudes of some US employers and the US government towards flexible working and employee rights is a political stance as well as the naked greed of employers, who have felt sufficiently emboldened to abandon any pretence of care towards their employees. In their eyes, increasing growth and profits justify the blatant disregard of employees needs and concerns.

Whether the liberation seemingly promised in ‘Employment Is Dead’ will be a boon or a curse is heavily dependent upon the action of governments to support citizens in this change, versus the power of corporations who will try to push for precarity and atomisation of workers so they can exploit them.

And the impeding turmoil in AI is rooted in the financialisation of society, the power of investors and business over citizens and state action. The AI boom has been created by the current economic system that focuses on growth and hyper-returns rather than a desire to harness technological advancement for the good of humanity. The whole argument for AI is framed in terms of economic rather than social benefit.

It’s become unpopular in my lifetime to characterise employment as a struggle between the owners and the workers. We are often told business is not about politics, largely as a way to divert from the fact that it is very evidently about politics (and economics, which was originally called political economy). The divide is now becoming clear again.

Whilst it is clear cut in some cases (and it’s good that those companies are now showing us who they really are), others are wanting to work with their employees. So the question to ask yourself is “Which side of the divide is my employer on?”.

For those who say politics should be kept out of these discussions (as some do on LinkedIN), I’d say it’s like trying to take the eggs out of a cake. Or taking Musk out of your Twitter feed.