Exploring New Zealand’s future
The workshops look at possible, plausible and preferred futures to determine how the New Zealand tax and social policy system might look within them. Professor Agar says the workshops he attended were about the future of work and prediction.
“Basically, what tools do we have to either predict the future or insure ourselves against it, and what will work look like in the future? We can’t predict all of it but we can protect and prepare ourselves for the coming changes.”
The workshops examine the differing opinions of what the future of work will look like. “A lot of people are talking about how machines are going to take over our jobs so we should just give up on the idea of work and all have a guaranteed basic income to live on. I personally find this a bit disquieting; yes, we can get rid of the horrible jobs, but I see work as filling an important social role.”
Professor Agar’s view is that instead of getting rid of work, we should make it better. “Our jobs could be more about our self-expression, for instance.”
As for prediction: “There are ways you can predict—it’s a skill you can acquire. But if you’re talking about predicting ways in which societies will behave, more than a year into the future, it’s hopeless—there are too many variables.”
Professor Agar says there is a battle between economists who just want to use their models for prediction and people who say those models are limited and outdated.
“They aren’t very good as a predictive tool; you need to have something else. I also think there are dangers in prediction and we have to think expansively about the future. The future is close enough to be scary, and we need to develop a way of talking about it that doesn’t involve predicting it.”
Professor Agar is currently working on a new book, How to be Human in the digital economy, where he arguesthe solution is a hybrid social-digital economy—people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work.