The term "Industrial Revolution" conjures images of smoke-belching factories, overcrowded cities, and soulless, repetitive work overseen by avaricious robber barons. The Industrial Revolution also generated tremendous wealth and innovation, including the rise of the modern corporation, workplace protections for employees, and fundamental changes in international commerce. Its less obvious contribution was the creation of the very concept of a job: a combination of work tasks, regular hours, and specific compensation.
Subsequent phases of the Industrial Revolution included changes in technology that may have changed how effectively work is done, but did not alter the fundamental definition of the job itself.
Over the next decade, the future of work will be shaped by a completely new force: an "Intelligence Revolution", driven not by incremental automation in manufacturing processes but by exponential change based on machine learning, virtually free data storage and communication, and ever-increasing computational power that rivals some human capabilities.