STATUS
Ongoing

PI: Mr Poon King Wang (LKYCIC, SUTD)

Future of Work Program at LKYCIC

The Future of Work Program at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities (LKYCIC) is the lens through which we understand what is happening in the wider economy and society. It works with Smart Cities Lab to better understand the synergies and overlaps between smart cities, digital economies and digital societies.

The Future of Work Program is recognized in Singapore’s National AI Strategy 1.0 for contributing to a trusted and progressive AI future that balances commercial innovation and citizen interests (https://www.smartnation.gov.sg/nais/). The Program’s innovative approaches were summarised in this 7-minute video produced by the Konrad Adenauer Siftung, for sharing it with their stakeholders at the Falling Walls Foundation (which recognizes research that breaks boundaries) Creativity Bureaucracy Festival.

These innovative approaches combine AI with human insights across STEM and social science disciplines. As a result, the Future of Work research at LKYCIC has developed insights, strategies, and tools that empower countries, companies, and individuals to:

1) Deepen mastery in the digital age to raise resilience and innovation

2) Redesign jobs in the age of AI to build an inclusive economy

3) Nurture creativity, innovativeness, and failure tolerance in future generations

4) Overcome workplace ageism as economies and societies age

5) Build inter-generational workforces for the modern complex economy

6) Improve well-being and well-meaning for enhanced engagement at work

7) Strengthen capacity to continuously transition and transform

8) Raise resilience of gig/platform workers and the self-employed

9) Expand opportunities for vulnerable workers such as PWDs

10) Increase trust in AI and organizations (at a time when trust levels are falling)

Examples of our research areas include:

Job Redesign in the Age of AI:

  • Objective: To guide companies in managing the impact of AI on employees and to prepare for the future of work through human-centered job redesign and creative cross-sector transitions.

We have since extended this work to cover segments across: abilities (including PWDs), ages, career and life stages, and (un)employment status

We have also extended it to well-being and finding meaning at work

Distributed Mastery and Expertise in the Digital Age:

  • Objective: To explore how expertise and mastery are evolving in the digital age and the implications for intergenerational workplace learning, training, innovation, and performance.
  • Examples: Our work is based on over 1000 hours of organizational ethnographic observations – and coupled with other research methods – across sectors such as: transportation, trading, manufacturing, services, higher education, and high-tech startups. Seeing work and workers up close, our insights have concluded that the path to innovation and resilience will be increasingly less about individual-centric upskilling. Instead, it will be more about the capacity of individuals to harness the expertise distributed across different generations of domain experts and different generations of machines, which we call Distributed Mastery. We developed these concepts in a study under the Workforce Development Applied Research Fund by the Institute for Adult Learning. The full report can be found here. We were also invited to communicate our findings in shorter format for a book chapter in the International Handbook for Education Development in Asia-Pacific, which can be found here.

These insights have been tested against the latest findings of the impact of Gen AI on workers, and found to be robust. In fact, the emerging trends reinforce Distributed Mastery because Gen AI expands the number of ways we build expertise in humans and access expertise now found in AI, i.e. more distributed but also more ways to innovate and outperform (forthcoming book chapter expected in 2H 2024)

We have also extended this work to look at how we can nurture innovativeness and failure tolerance in our learners

Future of X:

  • Objective: To secure the future by providing foresight into the future.