Business

Back in the early 19th century, young cotton mill manager Robert Owen began theorising ways in which the productivity advances of the industrial revolution could be harnessed not just to improve the profits of cotton merchants and manufacturers, but to make workers’ lives a little better at the same time. A pioneer of collective ownership, the eight-hour working day and innovative feedback mechanisms for quality control, Owen’s mills were not just better places to work than their more infamous rivals, they were also more profitable. From Marxist theorists to modern management gurus, Owen’s practices have been a staple of “future of work” discussions for over 200 years.

Then, as now, most of those discussions have been framed by the extremes of hyperbole and panic, as debates polarise and move further and further from the point at which evidence and reality influence opinion. Today, we’re told that either AI is changing everything and we’ll all be out of work tomorrow, or that we’re facing an economic apocalypse to dwarf 2008 that will occur when investors realise they aren’t ever going to get back the trillions spent on Nvidia chips and datacentres.