GERD LEONHARD
RISE
OF THE MACHINES
MEDIA
FUTURIST & CEO, THE FUTURES AGENCY
THE BIG IDEA: MECHANICAL TASKS WILL BE AUTOMATED AND THERE WILL BE A RENEWED
FOCUS ON TRULY HUMAN-ONLY CAPABILITIES
The concept of ‘work’ has been at the heart of both the industrial as well as the information society, along with ‘jobs’ and ‘growth’ and that most rapidly outmoding term, GDP (expect a new metric to emerge here, soon, along the lines of ‘gross national well being’). But what will work mean in a knowledge society, or indeed in some form of an ‘experience society’? What will happen when merely maximizing efficiency and productivity becomes the chief domain of machines, rather than humans? Most of us used to work because we needed to earn a living. Those that didn’t work in the traditional sense such as some artists, spiritual leaders, rich heirs and the independently wealthy, dropouts or those that were somehow unfit to work, were looked upon as a burden to society since their contributions were not measurable by conventional metrics. Does an artist or an inventor or an author ‘work’ in the same way as an engineer or a factory labourer? Hardly. Yet, these ‘right-brain’- dominated occupations may be the destination that many of us may be headed in, soon. The distinction of ‘having work’ or not will change very soon as ‘work’ in its traditional sense will be increasingly hard to come by in the near future; technology is rapidly automating every single job that has any machine-like component. This is an inevitable trend that will change our society at the core. In less than seven years, it will not take some 337 low-skilled workers to assemble an iPad in China — it will take 20 smart robots and 20 workers running them. Imagine a time in the not too distant future when Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered services file our taxes for us or plot our physical exercise according to our actual needs and body readiness at that very moment. In the past, many data-crunching tasks such as accounting were handled by real people using computers to find answers that made sense to humans. Most of this is sure to vanish as machines become truly intelligent, and as interfaces go from type to speak to gesture to blink to ‘think’. The term ‘work’ itself may soon become quite useless and I propose a new term: workupation, better suited to describe our future because whatever we will be occupied with is very likely to become our new work, monetised in a myriad of new ways, many of which are inconceivable today. Just take a look at how Flattr is proposing to pay people for their journalistic contributions, and how social reputation is already metered on platforms such as Klout or Peerindex. We are rapidly becoming a truly ‘networked society’ and ‘work’ is one of those core disruption zones that is impacted by the exponential advancements in ‘big data’ technologies, machine intelligence, robotics and overall automation. Crowdsourcing, tele-working and the globally overall dissolving barriers between industries are additional trends that impact the future of work. We must also consider that the global trend towards mobilization, the rampant consumerization of IT and the total empowerment of consumers that goes with it. Recent studies have confirmed that many of us now work 10-20% more than before we had smart phones and socialbusiness-networks. It is already hard to say if what we are doing at any given moment is ‘work’ or not. It is simply ‘what we do’ and often what we feel passionate about - and this trend will only get stronger in the future as we are leaving the menial data-driven and somewhat mechanical tasks to smart machines and move on to focus on our human-only capabilities. This, to me, defines the shift from work to workupation — we will be occupied with projects and issues that really matter to us rather than those that require machine-like skills or (worse) machine-thinking; and of course, machines will beat us hands-down at being cheaper, faster and more reliable on 99% of those tasks, as well. So what will happen when smart machines and AI take over 30-50% of our jobs? How will we cope with what we now call ‘unemployment’ of over 50%? This will be nothing less than a total redefinition of work , jobs and employment, itself, and maybe those of us that have been lucky enough to consider their work to be what they would do even if they did not have to do it - or would not get paid for it -, those that have found their true calling regardless of remuneration, can show us the way towards this future. A future that will measure the value of our work not by ‘units’ that we have turned out, not by our contribution to increasing the GDP/GNP by merely increasing consumption or profits. A future that will measure our contributions wider, deeper and ultimately in a more human way.
CDET140103
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