British academic and writer Guy Standing coined a word we are guaranteed to hear more and more over the coming years and decades. The word is "precariat", which describes the notion of a precarious proletariat — or, to simplify matters, a workforce that can expect less job security and greater disruption.

Technological automation is accelerating the precariousness of work. Science-fiction robots delivering pizzas and supermarket checkout machines that nag you to remove the bag from the bagging area will one day seem like the harbingers of a much greater but less visible shift. What happens when software puts even lawyers and doctors out of work? Labour finance spokesman Grant Robertson has quoted figures that predict an overwhelming scale of change: up to 46 per cent of jobs that exist now may not exist in 20 years.

Of course this does not mean that nearly half of those currently working will be unemployed. As well as destroying old jobs, technological change creates new ones. But the increased pace of change, which Robertson believes will be 10 times faster than the industrial revolution of the 19th century, means that future workers will need to retrain more often and go through unstable periods of precariousness. A job for life will be a pipe dream and without planning, structure and intervention, many will find it hard to transition to something new.

Even if change is less dramatic than predicted, automation and precariousness are still expected to increase income inequality. At that point, even the most committed of capitalists would start to get worried. As former US Secretary of Labour Robert Reich says, if we have a future in which technology can provide everything, then nobody will be able to afford to buy anything.

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The Labour Party has been doing some bold thinking in this area. The proposal to fund three years of post-school education by 2025 is one way to help guarantee a more flexible, technologically adept workforce. The release of "future of work" ideas, timed for a conference with international experts such as Reich and Standing, was another. It was there that the idea of a Universal Basic Income was put forward, as a means of both redistributing the benefits of technological progress and providing an income during periods of precariousness.

It is pleasing to see some long-term, future-based thinking in New Zealand politics. It is sometimes said that Labour has spent too much of the past decade mired in identity politics and relative trivia, playing games of reactive "gotcha!" politics rather than tackling big issues that will actually change lives. Instead, it was the Prime Minister's turn to engage in short-sighted, headline-grabbing politics when he dismissed the ideas of Labour and experts like Reich and Standing as "barking mad". Like climate change and ageing populations, the future of work needs consensus not name-calling.

Robertson has stressed that Labour's ideas are just that at this stage, rather than fully-costed policy. But Labour is doing what an opposition should. Its "future of work" thinking suggests that Labour in 2016 might finally be developing an actual, workable alternative vision.