https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191016/16251843207/working-futures-cards-behind-stories.shtml

Over the last few weeks we've been writing about all of the various aspects of the stories in our Working Futures anthology of 14 science or speculative fiction stories all relating to the "future of work." We've been getting great feedback on the book so far and are excited with how many people have been reading it. If you haven't yet, please check it out as well -- and support Techdirt in the process. Here are all the posts summarizing the stories in the book:

The future of work is likely to be complicated

The future of work will have unexpected consequences

The future of work will blur the line between humans and machines

The future of work may be beautiful

Since we've now written about all the various stories in the book, for today's post, I wanted to talk a bit about the custom deck of cards we developed and used as part of the process in developing these stories.

As I've mentioned in some of the previous posts, much of the impetus behind the Working Futures project was to try to think through the actual implications of technology on jobs and labor in the future. There has been a lot of fretting and a lot of hand-waving, but little exploration of what might actually happen. That's not a surprise, because predicting the future is mostly impossible, especially when it comes to complex systems. However, one tool that has been really useful not for "predicting" the future, but for exploring multiple possible futures is scenario planning, which is frequently described as a structured way for groups to think about possible futures. It's not about predicting which future will happen, but to explore various trends, driving forces and the like to determine a few different possible futures -- and to explore the implications of each.