Consultant and Charrette LLC Partner Gary Bolles wants to understand the macro trends that are changing the future of work, and then to use this understanding to help individuals thrive in this new economy. Bolles thinks the unbundling of industries (like media) and products (like the PC) is a large part of the reason that we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the economy and the nature of work. “When you unbundle industries,” Bolles says, “you essentially create market conditions that mean new entrants can come in and dominant very quickly.”

How can we better prepare everyone from teens to Millennials for a more decentralized and increasingly independent future of work?

Esko Kilpi, founder of the research and strategy group Esko Kilpi Company, is bold enough to defy the consensus of  all of our other Future of Work interviews and argue work is, in fact, not changing. "Work has always been the same thing and work is always going to be the same thing," Kilpi says. "Work is solving other people’s problems. The way we solve problems, the way we define the problems—that is changing." Kilpi believes that technology, and smartphones in particular, are significantly elevating human capability and potential.

Cassie Divine, Business Leader for the Self-Employed Segment within Intuit’s Small Business Division, identifies three main problems of independent workers: untangling business expenses from personal, getting paid gross income (often inconsistently), and filing taxes. The biggest pain point overall, Divine says, is finding work and getting paid for that work. Quickbooks Self-Employed seeks to mitigate the administrative burdens faced by independent workers, so they can focus more on the actual work, and less on the attendant responsibilities that come with this work. The self-employed workforce has grown tremendously in the past 25 years, from 17 percent of the workforce to around 36 percent. In the next five years, roughly half of the workforce is projected to be engaged in independent work in some capacity. As the economy continues to change, our laws and regulations need to change along with it. "I’d love to see a world [where] being your own boss is just as good as working for somebody else, if not ten times better," Divine said.