Posted on: 10/06/2026

Thought Leadership

Dr Nicola J Millard reflects on long-standing debates about the future of work and why many technology-led predictions continue to fall short. Drawing on history, psychology and current discussions around AI, the article explores why challenges such as engagement, critical thinking and work design remain fundamentally human. It considers how organisations can move beyond efficiency gains to design work that supports better thinking, creativity and sustainable performance.

By Dr Nicola J Millard

Debates about how we work have long been fuel for many futurologists (including myself!) Engineer Charles P. Steinmetz predicted in 1921 that by 2023, “at the present rate of world progress there will be no back-breaking drudgery, and people will work no more than four hours a day”. In 1964 scientist and writer Arthur C. Clarke, foresaw that humans would “no longer commute, they will communicate”. In 1940 the New York Times had a story about the possibility of “technological unemployment” due to machines taking on human work.

We can see the same debates playing out in the media today. But is the real future of work debate bigger than automation, the number of hours we work, or the commute? We have some significant strategic challenges to tackle:

• Employee engagement at an all-time low (just 12% across Europe, according to Gallup’s latest annual poll)

• Productivity is flat despite decades of tech investment (as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow once observed: "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”)

• We are living longer, and extending our working lives (traditional retirement may be retiring)

• There is a squeeze on entry-level roles for young people

• Geopolitical uncertainty and climate change are disrupting global supply chains These are not just technology problems – they are work design problems.

As a psychologist working in innovation, I’ve long argued that technology only creates value if people adopt it and start to do new and better things. This is about changing behaviours, habits, and culture.

A crisis often acts as a catalyst for change. The ability to work from home using mobile technologies, connectivity, and video conferencing had been possible for a number of years before COVID hit. It took lockdowns to force many of us to switch to doing it almost overnight. But culture eats everything for breakfast, which is why (years after the crisis receded) we are still having debates about return to office mandates, home working, and hybrid working.

Presence does not necessarily equate to productivity, or engagement. The bigger challenge is about helping people to become engaged with their work. This isn’t about where people work; it’s about what they’re doing, how they’re managed, and what tasks they’re performing.

Artificial intelligence could offer both the solution and the problem here.

AI has the potential to become an extra brain, a personal assistant, and a collaborative partner. Many of us are now collaborating more with AI than our colleagues – which may pose some challenges for team cohesion!

Technologies such as Generative AI have the capability to make us fast, but they can also be both convincing and wrong (we have effectively automated mansplaining). This means that we can spend as much time as we have saved checking its output. Like Aesop's fable of the hare and the tortoise, our value may be precisely because we are slow, but strangely brilliant. We can cope with the chaotic, the emotive, and the unpredictable, where AI will struggle.

Unfortunately, the history of technology adoption has also shown us that technology advancements often intensify work rather than remove it. As Parkinson’s Law reminds us, work tends to expand to fill the time available. This means that whenever we complete a task faster than expected, more tasks swarm in to take up the extra time and space. Add to that the fact that our technologies allow us to be “always on”, and we potentially have a burnout problem. We need to resist the impulse to create “busywork inflation” and protect time for thinking.

There are some other human challenges here.

As work becomes more complex, we need to invest in resilience. We are already seeing this in the contact centre space, where pretty much all the easy, routine and mundane queries have been automated out. The result isn’t fewer jobs - it’s harder jobs. When automation removes the simple queries, what’s left are frustrated customers with complex problems. This means that front line employees are at higher risk of burnout.

The other hidden risk is that we may also forget how to do some of the basic tasks we’ve automated out. Many of us rely on navigation tools so much that we have forgotten how to read a map, or even acknowledge how we got from A to B. At an extreme, we may also find ourselves in a spot of bother because we blindly follow the technology, rather than the evidence of our eyes. One delivery driver discovered this the hard way when he recently made headlines after following GPS directions into the sea!

Our brains are brilliant. But they can also be quite lazy. As the psychologist & Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, once said: “thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they’d prefer not to.” Letting AI think, write, and decide for us, can result in us not learning anything, which is a particular issue if we are trying to build foundational skills. This creates a dangerous paradox: we need more critical thinking precisely as we risk losing it.

This means we need to build AI literacy - not blind trust. There is an education process for employees to understand better where AI use is helpful to them, and where there are dangers (particularly around quality control of output).

The future of work is not AI replacing people. It’s AI augmenting people. But to make this work well, leaders should be asking a simpler question: what problem are we trying to solve - and how should work change as a result?

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