This chapter provides an overview of five core dimensions that are central to the challenge of optimizing for a just sharing economy: Understanding socioeconomic externalities; pursuing resilience; charting more just and systems-oriented business directions; defining the future of work; and prioritizing access and equity. It highlights the multiple ways in which the analyses throughout the book intersect with these dimensions and argues that each of these dimensions conveys significant information about the values that must be prioritized in the next generation of sharing economy platforms. Finally, the chapter discusses a set of key questions that remain for future research and exploration.

Advances in production systems and technology, particularly around automation and robotics, have been accompanied in recent years by a resurgence of debate about the future of work. Many contemporary accounts inhabit a utopian space where radical change is desired and envisioned. They point to profound, possibly revolutionary change in the nature of work – perhaps the end of work. They place work at the centre of social life as presently known, and in so doing tend to offer up a critique of capitalist society in toto. During the twentieth century, Western economies grappled with the issue of automation, at the same time finding themselves oscillating between consumer-fuelled expansion and economic crisis. This produced an intellectual engagement with automation and post-work which has much in common with that of today’s ‘postindustrial utopians’. Even stretching back into antiquity, utopian thinkers imagined a world without toil, and so the notion of ‘post-work’, or the ‘end of work’ exists in the context of a long and distinctive intellectual heritage. This chapter presents an analysis of this intellectual heritage and seeks to illustrate continuity and disjuncture in the dynamics of what could be termed ‘post-work imaginaries’.

The tax system incentivizes automation, even in cases where it is not otherwise efficient. This is because the vast majority of tax revenue is derived from labor income. When an AI replaces a person, the government loses a substantial amount of tax revenue - potentially hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the aggregate. All of this is the unintended result of a system designed to tax labor rather than capital. Such a system no longer works once labor is capital. Robots are not good taxpayers. The solution is to change the tax system to be more neutral between AI and human workers and to limit automation’s impact on tax revenue. This would be best achieved by reducing taxes on human workers and increasing corporate and capital taxes.

This chapter explains the need for AI legal neutrality and discusses its benefits and limitations. It then provides an overview of its application in tax, tort, intellectual property, and criminal law. Law is vitally important to the development of AI, and AI will have a transformative effect on the law given that many legal rules are based on standards of human behavior that will be automated. As AI increasingly steps into the shoes of people, it will need to be treated more like a person, and more importantly, sometimes people will need to be treated more like AI.

This chapter concludes by responding to some of the controversies about artificial intelligence and possible criticisms of AI legal neutrality. It argues that AI legal neutrality is important regardless of whether AI broadly achieves superhuman performance, and that the law would not want to constrain AI development for protectionist reasons. It further argues that AI legal neutrality is a coherent principle for policymakers to apply, even though it allows the law to treat AI and people differently and will sometimes be at odds with other regulatory goals. Finally, it discusses some of the risks and dangers of AI and argues these are susceptible to management with appropriate legal frameworks.

With technologies advancing at a rapid pace, research exploring the potential impact of technologies on work (see Frey & Osborne, 2013, 2017) sparked widespread interest in the topic. This chapter reviews the emerging future-of-work domain with a focus on research efforts and key trends. This includes an overview of key future-of-work concepts, a brief review of historical examples of technological job disruption concerns, an exploration of the technological forces driving current work changes, a review of studies exploring the potential for automation, and an overview of opportunities for understanding and shaping the future of work.

Training and development serve as important mechanisms through which organizations can prepare employees for the future of work. This chapter outlines implications for training, including how extant research can inform future interventions and how these approaches might adapt to account for technological, demographic, and behavioral shifts in the workplace.