The pandemic has changed the way many of us work, but the changing landscape of how we do our jobs is nothing new, right? Whether it's self-checkout at the grocery store or a bomb-detecting robot, the way we work is always evolving. So, what does the future look like? That is the focus of a new GBH TV series called Future of Work, which taps a diverse range of experts and workers to address critical questions about the changing nature of technology, education, the remote workplace and inequality. Executive producer and series creator Denise Dilanni joined Aaron Schachter on Morning Edition to discuss the project. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Schachter: The opening credits series has some clips that made me laugh but ring true. Someone says robots are coming to take my job. And I wonder if that's the gist of the series — I always wonder if I'm going to be replaced by Max Headroom.
Dilanni: It is not the gist of the series; it is one underlying question. The series really asks a lot of questions of the day. And one of them is, what is the role of robotics, automation and even more pressingly, artificial intelligence in terms of how we make our livings and the future proofing of the American worker? I think we've been worried about the killer robots or the rise of the killer robots for decades, if not if not a generation or more. And in fact, what we find is robots in the form of cobots actually are helping to enhance work in many, many cases. So I don't think you should worry too much about robots coming for your job and not just yet.
Schachter: You mentioned the word future proofing. Can you explain what that is?
Dilanni: What we do in the series is try to really explore what is changing work — and it's not just automation and robotics. It's things like globalization and the rise and fall of trade unions and labor unions and the offshoring of jobs and the attempts to re-shore jobs. Hour one looks at all of those factors that are driving what we think of as the new industrial revolution.
What we learn from a lot of our experts in the series — in the old days, you'd go to school for 12 or 16 years, you'd graduate and get a job and ultimately you would retire. And that model no longer works for most American workers. These days, you go to school, you work, then you retrain, you reskill, you work. More education, more skills, more upskilling, and you may never retire. In terms of future proofing for ourselves and our children and our children's children, what are the types of skills that we all need as workers and how [do we] future proof that set of skills so you will be employable?
Schachter: There must be some evolution of this, right? It's not like you train for one job and all of a sudden that job no longer exists. Isn't there some sort of time frame of evolution?
Dilanni: It depends on your work sector, your industry sector. I think there are jobs that are really being disrupted very quickly. In the series, we tell a couple of historical stories to set the stage. One of them is the idea that when automation came in, [the assumption was that] bank tellers lost their jobs because they were replaced by ATMs. Well, what happened? A lot of bank tellers did lose their jobs, but then banking expanded, changed and morphed with other technologies and other business practices. And now there are other kinds of jobs in banking. So, we try very hard not to look at this as a zero-sum game.
What our experts say, and we talked to a couple of very important economists and thought leaders is, we will have jobs in the future, but we're not yet sure what jobs they might be.
Schachter: The production of the series started before the pandemic and continued right after everything was all shaken up. How did that change your focus as you were creating the series?
Dilanni: It was very challenging and daunting, although quite exciting. One thing we realized and you see throughout the three-hour series is that the pandemic was an accelerator of changes that already were afoot. For instance, before the pandemic, there was already a movement to separate work from the place of work. People were working, in many cases remotely, while the pandemic came like a hand grenade and blew that up. So instead of some few million people working remotely, we have 40 or 50 million white collar workers working remotely. It wasn't a new trend, but it was escalated profoundly by the pandemic. [Also,] a reliance on certain kinds of automation as people step back from certain kinds of work because the pandemic; certain companies began looking at other ways to accelerate adoption of automation.
Watch Future Of Work on GBH 2 at 10pm on Sept. 1, 8 and 15. Learn more about the series at
Future of Work Panel Discussion on Sept. 8.
