The concept of a “job for life” seems a distant dream for most people in 2019.

After all, the gig economy is mushrooming at an astonishing rate; an estimated 57 million people in the US and 1.1 million people in the UK rely on flexible short-term jobs to pay their bills.

This is set to increase. By 2035 most of us will be doing jobs without the security of long-term contracts, and our every move will be monitored at work thanks to billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

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That’s the bleak vision of a report by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA), designed to highlight the challenges and opportunities our future might hold. And it’s already becoming a reality.

“I had to log in [to software] at the start and finish of my shift and declare any breaks, including going to the toilet,” former employee at an online retailer, Sara McIntosh says. “They would count how many investigations I had done in a day on their system, then divide them by the working hours minus breaks to check I had reached my daily target.”

Most UK workers (56%) believe they are currently spied on at work, according to a report by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).