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The study aims to provide a critical review of the extent to which digital technologies are likely to replace human labour, the exponential rise in the amount of work to be done and how far distinctively human skills are future-proofed and therefore likely to be in short supply. It reviews the evidence for a permanent switch to home and remote working enabled by emerging technologies. It assesses the business, digital and labour strategies of work organisations and the promise and challenges from a dominant trend towards a digitally enabled flexible labour model.

A critical review of 1020 plus case studies and the extant literature was carried out.

The relationship between emerging technologies and work is widely misunderstood, and there are major qualifiers to the idea of an overwhelming tsunami of technology drastically reducing headcounts globally. Distinctive human skills remain valuable, the amount of work to be done is increasing exponentially and automation is becoming more a coping than a labour replacement mechanism. Moves to a hybrid digitalised flexible labour model are promising but not if short-term, and if the challenges they represent are not managed well.

The main limitation is that we are making projections into the future, though we are drawing on a lot of different sources and evidence and past data projected into the future.

The problem is not labour displacement but large skills shortages that will slow down the speed of technology adoption. Skills development is vital, as is the taking of long-term perspectives towards the management of hybrid, flexible working based on human-machine interactions.

Organisations need to revitalise their training and development and labour management models. Governments and intermediary institutions need to manage transition states if the skills required to gain economic growth are to be available, and to ensure that large labour pools do not get bypassed from not having requisite skills.

The study offers a more subtle and complex perspective on the emerging evidence about the future of technology and work.

The statements which have recently been made in various quarters to the effect that Danish butter is losing its hold on the English market, that its quality is deteriorating, and that the sale is falling off, are not a little astonishing in face of the very strong and direct evidence to the contrary furnished by the official records. As an example of the kind of assertions here alluded to may be instanced an opinion expressed by a correspondent of the British Food Journal, who, in a letter printed in the March number, stated that “My own opinion is that the Danes are steadily losing their good name for quality, owing to not using preservatives and to their new fad of pasteurising… .”

The British Food Journal is in no way concerned with politics, and as it would appear that the propositions put forward by Mr. CHAMBERLAIN are commonly regarded as constituting matter for political controversy instead of being looked upon as subjects for serious investigation and discussion entirely outside the field of politics, it would be an undesirable course and one likely to be misunderstood and, no doubt, misrepresented, were we to refer to the great question which is now before the country without plainly indicating at the outset that we have no intention of supporting or opposing any political party or any section of politicians. We believe Mr. CHAMBERLAIN'S suggestion that the subjects which he has brought forward should be discussed on a higher plane than on the muddy plane of party politics was a reasonable and proper suggestion which all men of sense who are not blinded by political bias should applaud and endeavour to adopt. We do not mean to say that problems of so complicated a character are capable of being accurately solved, in the present state of knowledge, by scientific methods other than actual experiment. They certainly cannot be solved by abstract discussions of a pseudo‐scientific character. The factors which enter into the problems of political economy are so numerous, so complex, and so little understood, that to endeavour to argue even on the basis of what are alleged by political economists to be well‐ascertained facts in the so‐called “dismal science” is to lay oneself open to the charge of theorising from insufficient data. HERBERT SPENCER has lucidly demonstrated the universality of this scientific crime. On comparatively simple subjects, in regard to which a man has no special knowledge, he will, if possessed of the quality known as common sense, generally decline to deliver oracular opinions; but, let a subject be sufficiently complex and let the data relating to it be few, obscure, and uncertain, then decisive opinions will be delivered by all and sundry,—and the more profound the ignorance the more decisive will be the expression of opinion.