What's the Future of Work?

Chapter 3. A World of Continuous Partial Employment

Get the O’Reilly Next:Economy Newsletter and receive ideas and insights on how technology is transforming the nature of work.

Our future workplaces are increasingly managed by apps and algorithms. Is technology empowering workers, or making them ever more helpless cogs in a corporate profit machine?

When we talk about the “on-demand economy,” we are really talking about two things: the ability of a consumer to summon a vehicle, their lunch, or their groceries with the touch of an app or a few words to Siri, Cortana, or Google Now; and the lives of the workers who respond to those summons. Instant on-demand consumer services mean workers must also be available on demand.

As Logan Green of Lyft noted, his company provides “transportation as a service.” Perhaps the more general point is that it provides labor as a service. At least for now, the car comes with a driver.

Companies such as Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit, Postmates, Upwork (and too many other new startups to count) all depend on a large pool of workers who make no set work commitments, who are bound to no schedule, but simply turn on an app when they want to work, and compete with other workers for whatever jobs are available.

These apps have gotten a lot of attention. But focusing that attention merely on “Next Economy companies” misses many of the deeper changes in the labor ...