I don’t say a huge amount about the work I do day to day, but I thought it’d be worth flagging some of what I’ve been up to.
I’m an Associate Director at the Institute for the Future of Work, a reseach charity exploring how AI and automation are changing work and working lives in the UK.
One of the big projects we are just bringing to completion after three years of research is the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides.
I’ve been helping lead on getting the research across the different workstreams published and publicised, and also distilled into policy briefings. Much of my work now is focus on operationalising this to help organisations and policymakers act on the implications of the work.
Coming up in January is the major closing conference (on Jan 27th) which is going to focus on presenting a radical reframing of ‘growth’ as a socio-technical innovation system focused on people, planet and productivity.
Another big project for us has been looking at the impacts of AI on creative work, which is obviously something very close to my heart. This has been in collaboration with the Turing Institute and Queen Mary University, and it has been amazing speaking to people working across so many sectors in the arts about what their experiences are.
I’ve also been working with organisations on AI skills development, and the principle of a ‘capabilities approach,’ drawing on my experiences in education over the past 20 years or so.
I mention this because I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work and think in this area at this particular time as the impacts of AI are felt across so many areas of life, and to try to help steer that towards good. I talk about this quite a bit in the concluding chapter in the book… but I thought it was worth saying how much of this thinking was formed, through interactions with some brilliant people across governance, industry and trades unions too.
Grab a copy of the book here.
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