Automate your own job

Democratising the future of work by giving people the power to design their own jobs

We are democratising the power to shape the future of work with a platform that hosts hundreds of public workshops in which people redesign their current job with automation - and in doing so tell a new national story about what ‘good work’ could be: what people want to do, how they want to grow, and where they want to contribute.

In turn this demonstrates citizen-driven demand for new forms of work, creating new opportunities for industry, government and technology to respond.

The future of work could mean greater realisation of human potential - but public discussion is stuck in debating the degree of job displacement: people can’t yet see past fears of job loss and companies can’t yet see where new value could be created if human capital was reinvested. The dominant narrative is powerlessness in the face of inevitable change. One danger is a popular backlash against technology.

To counteract that we need to massively increase the power of workers themselves - including those most disenfranchised - to shape this agenda. This is the moment to create a new narrative - not simply about greater productivity in the current economic paradigm, but greater human value - that sets the agenda for innovation on our terms.

To do that we need to discover what ‘good work’ means for diverse groups of people - and, importantly, what it could mean.

Public consultation tends to get mired in nostalgia for an old story of work - a defined trade, “a job for life”. 

Instead, our solution gives people an experience in which they decide which parts of their work to automate by forming the ‘best’ human-machine teams possible.  

This gives them insight into the potential for technology to enhance human work, and reveals what people think ‘best’ is - is the objective productivity, value, leisure time, relationships, mastery, satisfaction?  Demonstrating what people want to do instead with their time and energy shows where value could be created for both business and society. This in turn can direct investment in automation to bring a greater sense of meaning to human endeavour.

Our mission is to tell hundreds of positive stories - from farm workers to doctors to retail assistants - that form a narrative for future work on citizen terms, and invite industry leaders to respond with hundreds of initiatives that put people at the forefront of shaping work. 

Our solution is designed to reach into many communities with four components: 

• A workshop designed to work for a cross-section of very different workers, facilitated in multiple settings;
• Story-telling - think Humans of New York-style films of people’s re-designed jobs;
• A new definition of good work and value; 
• Practical, data-driven resources that individuals and employers can take up themselves, including new occupation types and cost-benefit studies of co-designing new jobs with employees.

This enables thousands of people in diverse communities to rethink their own career paths with AI. But we believe the bigger impact comes from catalysing a new dialogue between citizens, industry and technology.

Most current efforts prepare workers for future jobs in the face of changes that they have no power over.

We flip this process - workers themselves shape jobs that are desirable to them and in doing so determine both the criteria for ‘good work’, and opportunities for productivity and creative human endeavour that industry can respond to including the design of experiences that engage a broad range of workers in understanding and co-opting new technologies 

• Framing and measuring ‘good work’
• Distributing access to tools that support individuals and employers to invest in adapting jobs and skill profiles.

Advances in computer vision, sensor technologies and robotics will be used to demonstrate what a human-machine team working together can look like. The solution will also work with non-robotic forms of AI-enabled automation to demonstrate how well codified and repeatable tasks are amenable to automation. This will be essential in creating compelling demos that move people away from a competitive to a collaborative mindset, crucial in designing the future of work. 

We will also use technology for tracking activities during participant-driven research, storytelling, and helping people see their next steps, nurturinge a growth mindset and developing new skills post-workshop.

• Refined the prototype by co-designing the workshop format and stress-testing it in rural/urban locations with 60+ workers across contrasting job types, levels and industries
• Refined interaction with the story-telling platform
• Engaged leading academics to analyse initial stories and draw out possible criteria for good work
• Engaged industry and policy partners to explore formats for broader dialogue
• Developed the business model for a) replicating the engagement in multiple locations and b) scaling the impact - both outcomes for people themselves and influence on industry response
• Codified succesful facilitation ready for piloting at scale and appointed local delivery partners

In line with the mission of democratizing participation, our vision is for a format that can be hosted and evolved by communities nationally, backed up by a central platform that shares stories, aggregates data on ‘good work’ and makes follow-on tools for individuals accessible.

The big thing to crack in year 2 is a set of models that demonstrate tangible gains for employers reinvesting in their human capital.

One route to scaling impact is to focus on specific industries or communities to enable greater depth of understanding of the potential for new forms of work and value creation.

Though meaningful engagements with industry partners and labor participants, we will demonstrate concretely through AI-driven projects what human-machine collaboration can look like coupled with consultations and workshops to help them arrive at contextually and culturally relevant definitions of “good work”. The solution will be deployed in the form of community-centered workshops in domains that are ripe for disruption by AI-enabled automation. Hosting it onsite, sponsored by industry will increase accessibility to even the most marginalized workers. 

A workshop was held in Vancouver, Canada earlier this year that brought together over 50 experts, workers, government administrators, policy makers, researchers, etc. from around the globe to set the foundation for “good work”. The diversity and collaborative nature of the workshop enabled us to capture different perspectives on how technology will shape the future of work and how people might play an active role in shaping how it impacts them. The outputs from the workshop will be used as input to the other work this year. 

The low-skill end of the job market is most at risk of automation, especially young people and those with low education. In Canada, that’s mostly in logistics, transportation, finance and administration: close to 2 million employees by 2038.

We expect to reach 60+ people in 12 months to 10,000 in 3 years, with further reach through engagement with the stories online.

By increasing people’s understanding of how to work alongside technology, and building proven ‘growth mindset’ techniques into the workshop, we can increase self-efficacy and influence the likelihood they will seek out ways to develop new skills.

Abhishek specialized in labor impacts in finance at Concordia University. He founded the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. He is a Software Engineer in Machine Learning at Microsoft and an AI ethics researcher at McGill. 

Jennie is a globally recognised service design and social innovation expert. As a director of Participle she designed and scaled 4 social enterprises which gained international renown as a radical models of ‘relational welfare’.

Jennie also works at the Rockwool Foundation, Denmark’s leading labour market research institution.

Focus on catalysing and developing. In previous incarnations have successfully launched and taken to scale 5 social enterprises. Intention is to create a new delivery organisation or develop a joint venture with established partners once the optimal route to market has been established.

We believe that the Solve program is a unique opportunity from the perspective of public feedback and co-construction which is the central element of our proposal. Being able to build on the Solve platform provides us with access to a diverse corpus of participants and ideas about what “good work” can mean in different cultural contexts. Going through the Solve program will accelerate the prototyping phase for us and provide us with the necessary technological expertise and network of partners to collect meaningful feedback and create a truly impactful program

Labour pushback and lack of sufficient technical progress (at the moment) to demonstrate the imminent change in workforce dynamics. Potential lack of self-realization of what ‘good work’ can be and snapping out of the fixed mindset and narrative of traditional work values. We believe that leveraging Solve’s expertise in creating compelling demos and narratives, strong network of potential partner organizations, technical expertise in AI applications from the MIT network, and most importantly Solve’s support in scaling testbeds will be crucial to collect meaningful results that can help shape the future of “good work”.