Are we brave enough to reinvent work?

These are times of change for workers. To adapt Churchill's famous 1939 aphorism about understanding Russia, young people entering the labour market today confront a pandemic, wrapped in a technological revolution, inside a climate crisis. This lecture draws on thinking offered in Prof Nick Agar's 2019 MIT Press book How to be Human in the Digital Economy about the challenge to work that comes from the digital revolution. At least part of the solution lies in imagining jobs that are a better fit for our natures as essentially social beings. Nick will be calling on the imaginations of audience members. Can we imagine how work done by humans might be reinvented? Could we find a solution to the global phenomenon of the “Mass Resignation” at a time of critical shortages in skilled workers?

Professor Nick Agar is Professor of Ethics at the University of Waikato. He previously taught at Victoria University of Wellington and (most recently) at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He has written extensively on the consequences for human beings of technological change. Nick has published books with MIT Press and Oxford University Press. His most recent writings have appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books and the ABC in Australia.

The Tauranga Public Lecture Series is a free community event and open to the public to attend. Please register your attendance by clicking on the 'register' above and bring your e-ticket with you on the evening.