The World Still Has Work. But Where Are The People?

In my recent post, Too Few Hands, I wrote about a world still rich with purpose—but starved for the people to carry it. Hospitals with beds but no nurses. Orchards with fruit but no ladders unfolded. Classrooms full of hope, yet always one step behind a shifting future.

This video takes those moments off the page and puts them in motion. You’ll see the quiet rooms, the empty fields, the lone figures still showing up when the weight is heavier than it should ever be. It’s the story of work undone—not for lack of will, but for lack of fit—and what it feels like when the cracks in our systems become canyons.

Too Few Hands

What happens when the world still has work – but not enough people to do it?

The Snapshot

By 2030, something strange had taken hold in the global economy.

It wasn’t a recession.
It wasn’t a collapse.
In many ways, it looked like prosperity: demand was strong, innovation surged, and open roles stretched across nearly every sector. But quietly, and then all at once, we ran into a different kind of scarcity:

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A Possible Future: Automation Shifts The Economic Paradigm

In exploring possible futures, we give ourselves an opportunity to shape them. With all the existing and emerging science and technology building blocks converging with domains like society, the economy, and geopolitics, predicting the future is impossible. But we can look at possibilities and what they mean to our future. One great recent example was described in an article by Tristan Greene. In looking at artificial intelligence and related automation, Mr. Greene focused on how automation could turn capitalism into socialism. This is not a political discussion, rather, it is following a thread to a logical conclusion. In this case, the impact of automation on the future of work. Mr. Greene said:

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Robots Are Constructing a Dam in Japan. Are Buildings Next?

Here is a scenario I expect to see play out increasingly over time:

To address Japan’s rapidly aging workforce and labor shortage, contractor Obayashi Corporation has turned to automation by constructing a dam almost entirely with robots

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