The first event in the Victorian Fabians Spring series on the future of work, "What is happening to work and will there even be any in future?" set the scene for the rest of the series, as well as setting out the problem of work and inequality. Dr Julia Thornton is the Victorian Fabians Acting Chair and a key architect of this series. She has studied the intersection between society and technology in both her Masters' degree and her PhD, and has recently attended two conferences on the future of work. She spoke on the conditions leading to substantial changes in the amount and kind of work we can expect to see in future. She suggested that the bulk of the commentary on changes to work focus on the people who can expect to benefit from it, professionals and entrepreneurs. The trends that are usually credited with producing changes to work and almost inevitably, a loss of jobs include globalisation, increased longevity, climate change and most prominently advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence and the speed of technological change. Jobs that cannot be automated are at the top and bottom of the income and status range. Those that are most in danger of being lost are based on routine manual work, such as manufacturing, and more surprisingly, routine cognitive work, especially in education, legal services and financial advice. These jobs are overwhelmingly the jobs in the social middle. She argued that we need to think carefully about unintended consequences of blindly granting such trends the force of inevitability. We need instead to think carefully about how to understand what we are collectively creating in terms of inequality.