According to a lushly animated Chobani ad from last year, the future of work is agrarian and cutting-edge, folksy and modern—WWOOF meets Wakanda, perhaps. The commercial pictures a world in which farming retains a familial, salt-of-the-earth vibe despite the existence of robots so prehensile they can pick fruit. “A business is only as good as its people,” a farmer narrates as workers gather around a peculiar spread of bread, tomato soup, and a heaping bowl of yogurt, and a drone drops off a carton of oat milk. The ad may be set on a future farm and designed to peddle dairy products, but its pastoral setting and utopian veneer riff on the pitches of many companies seeking to present a change to workplace scenery as an upgrade in quality of life.

During the pandemic, predicting “the future of work” has become a cottage industry among economists and alike. Though