‘Why am I telling you all this?’ asks Gershuny, with a grin. ‘Well, when you define work quite widely like this, you arrive at a really quite extraordinary discovery, which is that work time — that is the sum of paid and unpaid work time — doesn’t change very much. Looking at all the data we have access to, the total is pretty constant, at about 60 hours per week.’ That’s just over a third of our 168-hour week, and a little more than the approximately 50-hour chunk we manage to spend sleeping.

He points to decades of evidence accumulated by his team — in countries including Australia, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and plenty more — that confirm the trend, as well as working time regulations from as far back as the Industrial Revolution. His latest dataset — a huge survey of British residents carried out in 2015 — was being downloaded in full the day we met, but a preliminary analysis already suggested that his observation holds true. ‘The truth is, we need work for various reasons: a time structure, a social context, a purpose in life,’ he explains. Indeed, what many people citing Keynes’ famous talk about the future fail to mention is that he went on to suggest that ‘there is no country and no people… who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.’ In other words, he thought that most us couldn’t really begin to comprehend the reality of not working. Gershuny agrees, arguing that humans will simply endeavour to find new types of work to do in order to busy themselves, whether the robots take over the jobs we currently possess or not.

Ruth Yeoman

Dr Ruth Yeoman, a Research Fellow at the Saïd Business School who researches meaningful work in organisations and systems, points out that the human desire to find meaning in work is hard to ignore. She explains that the drive to work is so strong that people seek positive meaning in work that is considered by many people to be dirty, low status or poorly paid. ‘Hospital cleaners, for instance, interpret their work to be meaningful and worthwhile because they enlarge the scope of that work in their own minds,’ she explains.

‘It’s not just about cleaning, it’s about contributing to making patients well and the hospital welcoming.’

This phenomenon allows humans to justify all kinds of work to themselves as useful and relevant, it seems, regardless of what it actually is.

Frey and Osborne aren’t so confident that humans are resourceful enough to create new work for themselves, though. Frey has actually studied the rate at which new jobs are being generated as a result of technological change. His findings suggest that about 8.2% of the US workforce shifted into new types of jobs — that is, roles associated with technological advances — during the 1980s. In the 1990s the figure fell to 4.4% and in the 2000s it dropped to just 0.5%. The evidence suggests that the new industries we might assume to be the salvation of the labour force — such as web design or data science — aren’t creating as many new positions as we may hope.

Part of the reason for that, argues Osborne, is that many of the new job roles being created are related to software, rather than hard, physical goods. ‘Software is pretty cheap with next to zero marginal cost of reproduction,’ he explains. That means that a small group of people can have a great idea and easily turn it into a product that’s used the world over, while barely growing the size of its team. The smartphone messaging service WhatsApp is a prime example: it was purchased by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, when it served 700 million users. At the time, it had just 55 employees.

Trouble at the top

Counting specific jobs may, however, be overly simplistic when it comes to thinking about how the working lives of real people are set to change. ‘People often think about the work that people do as a monolithic indivisible lump of stuff,’ explains Daniel Susskind (@danielsusskind), a Lecturer in Economics at Balliol College and co-author of a new book called The Future of the Professions. ‘The problem is, that encourages the view that one day a lawyer will arrive at work to find an algorithm sitting in his chair, or a doctor turn up to a robot in her operating theatre, and their jobs will both be gone.’ Instead, he argues, we should be focusing on the separate tasks that make up job roles.