A new book explores the gig economy and its effects on our working lives.

In the not-too-distant-future, we won’t need jobs. Instead of being full-time employed, we’ll do ad hoc work in the “gig economy”. We won’t even need to go into an office. Sounds good, right?

But, as Ms Sarah Kessler explores in her new book Gigged: The Gig Economy, The End Of The Job And The Future Of Work, Silicon Valley’s utopian vision is only half the story. It’s a happy one for those with scarce skills, who can get paid more as “independent contractors”, but not for the likes of cleaners and couriers, who don’t. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “gig” as “a job, especially one that is temporary or that has an uncertain future”. Not so innovative.

And while the benefits of the gig economy can include flexibility, they don’t include actual benefits. By classifying workers as contractors, companies can avoid stumping up for sick and holiday pay, health insurance and retirement savings, plus undercut the minimum wage and lay off their non-employees without so much as a “by your leave”. (Ms Kessler describes Uber’s success as driven partly by “essentially a tax classification”.)

With technology rendering ever more jobs obsolete, MR PORTER has identified five professions that are relatively safe – at least for as long as it takes you to read Gigged, anyway.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2020 there will be 1.4m computer science jobs, but only 400K computer science graduates to fill them. In her book, Ms Kessler follows the fortunes of a New York programmer who quits his full-time job to become a freelancer and earn the same good money – $10,000-$12,000 a month – via the platform Gigster, which gives tech professionals easy access to work. (Maybe this is why Silicon Valley is so evangelical – it thinks everyone is a programmer.) There is the slight snag in that Gigster aims to automate programming by up to 60 per cent in the next 15 years. Until then though, you’re quids in.

Believe it or not, computers aren’t good at recognising pictures of, say, cats or shoes. To teach them, crowdsourcing websites such as Mechanical Turk, founded by Amazon, hire people to tag thousands of photos of felines or footwear. It pays cents per picture or fractions thereof. You might see the odd animal mutilation or ISIS decapitation, but hey, it’s paid employment. It’s surprising how what you think is performed by sophisticated software is often done by low-paid people, such as transcribing photos of business cards or telling you the nutritional value of food in a picture.

New companies are wont to pitch themselves to investors, journalists and users as the “Uber for X” (the title of a chapter in Gigged). Who needs expensive, slow-to-build infrastructure when you’ve got clever software and a shiny interface? Yes, you might take a cut of a worker’s already low pay. And yes, the gig may be up for this business model soon if it isn’t already – with many of its adopters changing tack or going bust while those that haven’t, including Uber, brush with the law. Just IPO (initial public offering, yeah?) for a vastly inflated valuation ASAP and make a sharp, smug exit.

Ubers and a fleet of similar apps such as Lyft enable you to make a living from your vehicle, once you’ve paid off the loan that you took out from the company to buy your car – a practice Uber has since stopped. And just last week the apparently jinxed company announced free insurance cover for drivers across Europe. Great! Except that an executive who was interviewed for a job at Uber told The Guardian that the chief product officer let slip its plan to replace drivers with robots (a spokesman said its employee did not recall this statement). Maybe not then.

OK, this one is a little meta (especially as this writer is freelance). But as Ms Kessler observes, Silicon Valley’s vaunted gig economy currently affects a tiny proportion of workers: 0.5 per cent in the US as of 2015 and four per cent in the UK in 2017. Yet Uber et al command a disproportionate amount of attention from media and policy makers. The voguish gig economy is however indicative of a much wider trend for job instability and insecurity: it’s practically a euphemism. And in these uncertain times, one thing is sure: we need people like Ms Kessler (and MR PORTER) to demystify it all.

Gigged: The Gig Economy, The End Of The Job And The Future of Work (Random House) by Ms Sarah Kessler is published 14 June