Happy New Year!
Here are our somewhat doom-laden predictions for the world of work and more in 2025 – but with some positive undercurrents nonetheless!
From time to time, not every year, here at Flexibility we make predictions for the coming year – mainly about work but also the impacts across wider society.
Turns out we did quite well with the last ones at the end of 2022! Maybe less marketing of holopresence that we anticipated, but hey, everything else was pretty much on the mark!
However, our predictions for 2025 are possibly the gloomiest you’ll read this season. Because this is the real world we’re dealing with. Progress is rarely a straight line towards a brighter future. And, as I always say, the future is always plural and multispeed.
And that includes some trends going into reverse, at least partially. Plus, we should never underestimate the human capacity for spurning opportunities to improve the world we live in, through fear of the future or the pursuit of short-term self-interest.
So here we go – onward with the festive gloom!
Key elements of the challenging backdrop to the future of work in 2025 will be:
- intensifying conflict
- employee layoffs
- high profile businesses collapsing (and people drawing the wrong lessons from those)
- a resurgence of inflation
- increased lionising of ‘strong’ leaders offering arbitrary solutions
- mountains of misinformation and disinformation, and
- a new passion for drawing boundaries. Everywhere.
Fear of the future will drive many decisions around two of the most key areas for the future of how we work: flexibility and the use of AI. Expect significant and high-profile pushback on both counts, with cycles of media focus on Things That Go Wrong (or apparently so).
However, the continuing decentralisation of work and the wider uptake of AI are unstoppable, despite the best efforts of prominent people in the year ahead.
Public sector disruption
Civil servants in the UK and US will come in for a major hammering. That’s just in case the never-ending abuse from right-wing media and politicians hasn’t been enough over the past few years.
Intended to achieve a rewiring of the state through force-fed disruption, it will instead lead to an unwiring of many aspects of effective government and public service delivery. (Just in case things weren’t dysfunctional enough already thanks to the shifting sands of political management and random decision-making.)
This will be accompanied by the intensifying backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and personnel. And probably an associated culling of HR in many organisations, in response to the expansion of numbers in recent years and aspects of mission-creep, as well as the ideological motivations. And, indeed, AI should be able to automate many functions in the HR field – so robots will increasingly take over their tasks, if not their jobs.
In the UK, government is set to press ahead with building millions of new homes. If they have any more success than previous governments’ promises, whihc is open to doubt, we can expect new homes delivered won’t be fit-for-purpose as we move forward into a world of distributed working where homes play a key role in the Extended Workplace. That’s unless policymakers read our take on this on Flexibility.co.uk!
Expanding fields of distributed work
Three expanding fields of work in particular will create many new opportunities for employment and contracting:
- Space
- Undersea
- New weapon systems in the military.
These three areas have particular relevance to distributed working, with remote, semi-autonomous and autonomous systems and ways of working.
But we may not like all the capabilities that emerge.
We’ll see use in earnest of Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs), essentially using lasers to bring down missiles and drones or to fry enemy electronic systems. Drone swarms coordinating themselves through AI, and self-directed hunter-killer Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) will be part of the new arms race.
Developing and programming these, and analysing data from their testing and use, will be part of the military distributed landscape of work, linking designers, makers, research departments, satellite companies, intelligence analysts and frontline operatives.
Open AI overcoming its scruples about working with the US military is just one sign of increased AI activity on future battlefields.
Circle the wagons!
It doesn’t take a prophet to see a potential tariff war coming in 2025 and an intensification of economic protectionism, which is likely to create new inflationary pressures and hit certain sectors hard.
However, they are not the only boundaries that will be in vogue.
The developing tsunami of unreliable information, increasingly churned out by somewhat unreliable generative AI often in the hands of very unreliable people, creates a landscape where serious organisations need to ring-fence their data and define the the boundaries within which their tailored AI can operate. Large Language Models In A Box, basically.
So we will have bounded areas where there is data and their use in applications we can trust – and then there’s all the rest ‘out there’, outside our safe and bounded spaces, where we’ll need to tread increasingly carefully.
In the general mayhem of the wider Internet, new players will emerge creating bounded areas for communities of interest. These will require more stringent verification that users are real, trustworthy and accountable. A new hope, maybe – but nonetheless creating ethical issues around standards, censorship and echo-chambers.
Alternative and instrinsically flexible economies building up in the background
One thing that is being missed when governments propose measures to get the economically active back into work is that a significant proportion of them are not actually economically inactive. They just don’t want to be economically active in the way that governments expect them to be, i.e. working for traditional employers. They can be bosses of their own brand, tapping away at their computers.
Pumping out content online fuels influencer ambition and creates real possibilities for earnings from various platforms, as well as encouraging delusions about the same.
AI is supporting this trend very significantly, enabling creation and manipulation of both written and visual material, automated text-to-speech and enabling people to create output of a quality unthinkable a couple of years ago, even if falling short of professional production standards. The quality threshold has dropped for entry, and online audiences’ expectations in line with it. Arguably, it’s the democratisation of broadcast media. People can also make significant amounts of money from gaming and various forms of trading via a variety of platforms.
All this is adding up to a self-reliant, if under-taxed, economy of creators and traders. Now that people are mastering video production and getting to grips with ever more capable AI tools, expect 2025 to be a boom year for this slightly bonkers and lightly regulated economy.
So where and when will people be working when they do this this? Primarily at home, and at times that work for them. Possibly flexing around or in conjunction with other work. And maybe at a coffee shop when they need a little company.
And who will they be working for? Mostly, themselves, not for large employers. But we shoudln’t imgine they are all loners, by any means. There are multiple possiblities for working with others, both online and ‘in real life’. Working together with family members is also a growing phenomenon here.
Is this a good thing? Or do you want to tear your hair out when you see the inanity of so much of it, and fear for the future of our children being sucked into this vortex? Anyway, it’s real, and it’s going to be happening somsewhere very near you in 2025.
We also see in China, where these kinds of self-starter online markets are more developed, phenomena like live broadcasting on social media with concurrent sales of products and courses, as top influencers and gurus on every subject imaginable (except politics!) talk seemingly endlessly. We’re bound to see more of this in the west soon too.
What would I like to see in 2025?
What I’d hope to see is what might be called the ‘rational centre’ regain its confidence and start to reassert itself.
That’s not the political centre necessarily, but the range of people who respect and prioritise evidence over assertive opinion, want to test and see the sources for information, have a mindset for critical thinking and who think professional expertise is actually important.
But 2025 probably won’t be the year for this – we’ll need to wait a while for the assertive alternatives currently dominant to rack up their failures, before the rational centre can safely come out of the trenches.
And I’d like to see more oxygen given to the examples of new ways of working that are quietly getting on with the job and working well. Here at Flexibility.co.uk, we’ll do our best to deliver on that!
