Tomorrow's workforce: humans and machines collaborating?

Beyond the evolution of cross-border flows of goods, services, labour, capital, data, information, and knowledge, advances in technology are changing the broader structure of the global economy and of capitalism itself. The impact of these changes is affecting the nature and structure of production and work, of what we consume, and of how a capitalist global economy mobilizes to face existential challenges like the climate crisis. Thinking about the impact of technological change on the broader global economy and on the future of capitalism is important for the argument of this book. How we think about and understand the global economy and capitalism, and our expectations for the future that are based on those understandings, affect what policies we choose and how we advocate for them. Our expectations for capitalism's future also affect how we approach and implement the diplomacy that will be required to make our future policy choices succeed.

The single greatest impact of changing technologies upon the global economy is on work, the workplace, and workers. The nature of work in the industrial world has been changing since the 1990s in ways going substantially beyond the offshoring of jobs and tasks owing to the emergence of global value chains under Globalization 2.0. The domestic transformation of the workplace in industrial countries has been equally broad. Increasingly, the production model of firms employing workers for whole careers and providing advancement, benefits, and job security has been replaced by outsourcing of components and processes and the casualization of the production process through use of contract, part-time, and temporary workers (Harvey 1990, pp. 150– 55). Workers responded to this disaggregation of production processes and corporate workforces by marketing themselves and their services to prospective buyers in a newly defined ‘gig economy’. The emergence of the gig economy coincided with the arrival of the internet, enabling workers to connect with customers on a scale hitherto impossible. Entrepreneurs created online platforms permitting purveyors of everything from homemade crafts (Etsy) to services like ride sharing (Uber, Lyft) and food delivery from restaurants (Grubhub, Doordash) to sell to customers efficiently and safely.