What about the workers?

In Chapter 3 we look at the debate on the Future of Work (FoW), suggesting that it can be argued that it is not the future of work but the future of workers that is uncertain. We consider various perspectives on the robotization of work, and the replacement of, or complementarity between, workers and Artificial Intelligence. Following this, we examine the massive urbanization that has been taking place in the Global South over the past several decades and what it means for the nature of work across the planet. Principally, we suggest that, rather than supplanting many of the work practices of the pre-i4.0 economy, present developments are actually highly dependent upon them. They are also generating significant precarity for workers. Finally, the fact that many i4.0 practices rely upon ‘informal’ Global South workers challenges views which see the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies as realms somehow separate from one another.