Work follows us home on our smartphones, tugging at us during an evening out or in the middle of our children’s bedtime routines. It makes permanent use of valuable cognitive space, and chooses odd hours to pace through our thoughts, shoving aside whatever might have been there before. It colonises our personal relationships and uses them for its own ends. It becomes our lives if we are not careful. It becomes us.

What comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

How games, phones, and other tech innovations are changing the labor force.

This essay is adapted from the speech given by Erik Hurst at the 527th Convocation at Chicago Booth in June 2016. 

The question of how to distribute wealth in the future curves back round to meet a conundrum raised by the past: how do we remake the social safety net so that it embodies solidarity, generosity and trust, rather than the welfare state of the present, rickety with the woodworm of mutual suspicion.

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found that a third of people whose brains, upon autopsy, display the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s never exhibited memory loss or intellectual impairment. The best predictor of whether someone would escape these symptoms was whether they felt strongly that they had a purpose in life. Those who did were two and a half times as likely to be unafflicted as those who didn’t.

Unless employers and employees act today, the threat of automation and a jobless future could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How will rapid technological progress and the prospect of longer, healthier lives revolutionize work?

As digital marketplaces offer individuals new avenues for generating income, their numbers could grow sharply in the decade ahead. These platforms are creating flexible opportunities for individuals who want to be free agents, but they are raising real concerns about the insecurity associated with the so-called "gig economy."

The end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. 

Our working days are becoming interspersed with leisure and home activities. We will need to learn to adapt to a freeform schedule, which will present a psychological challenge to those who crave structure. 

The gig economy rewards hustle. Workers entrenched in a passive, complacent employee mindset that relies on their employer to provide a sense of stability, career progression, and financial security will struggle.

Independent workers who are comfortable with and excited about developing their own income streams, marketing themselves, and connecting with others are best positioned to take advantage of the many opportunities the gig economy offers.

Design has matured from a largely stylistic endeavor to a field tasked with solving thorny technological and social problems, an evolution that will accelerate as companies enlist designers for increasingly complex opportunities, from self-driving cars to human biology.

If history is our guide, job displacement from smart machines jobs simply means that knowledge workers must learn how to adapt, similar to how civilization successfully transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial society. They must learn how to supplement and enhance their skills.

New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others. The skill sets required in both old and new occupations will change in most industries and transform how and where people work. It may also affect female and male workers differently and transform the dynamics of the industry gender gap. The Future of Jobs Report aims to unpack and provide specific information on the relative magnitude of these trends by industry and geography, and on the expected time horizon for their impact to be felt on job functions, employment levels and skills.

By 2020, 40% of the population will be racial minorities, and more than half of the population under 18 will be racial minorities, adding that by 2023, whites will total less than half of the U.S. population under 30. Overall, this new minority demographic is estimated to comprise 56% of the total U.S. population by 2060, compared with 38% in 2014, as reported by NPR.

What this all means from a workforce perspective is that as baby boomers filter out of jobs into retirement and gradually lose their social and business-oriented dominance, jobs will need to be filled within the hierarchy of business and industry by younger, exceedingly multiracial workers.

The way we are working is changing fast and traditional career paths look less and less relevant. This story is part of The Guardian's series on the future of work that  examine emerging models and ask what's to celebrate, what's to fear.

This article looks at five trends: 

1 | Workplace structures

2 | Artificial intelligence

3 | The human cloud

4 | Workplace monitoring

5 | The end of retirement