I really wanted to be a teacher when I was five years old. To be honest, it was not because I liked the idea of imparting knowledge but because I really enjoyed using the duster to wipe the blackboard clean. Had I actually become a schoolteacher, I would have been highly disappointed when smart boards replaced blackboards in classrooms.
Instead, I became a journalist. A profession I had certainly not thought about at that age but it’s a profession that did exist at that time. If you ask me now if I think journalism will exist 25 years from now, I really wouldn’t know how to answer that question. Sure, people will need news but will they be getting it from journalists? Will aspiring editors spend hours correcting the syntax and grammar, and thinking of the best headlines, or will AI just find the best option within seconds?
This week in The Global Tiller we try to understand what the future of jobs will be like, which professions are becoming obsolete and which ones are in demand.
In the recently published Future of Jobs Report 2020, the world will see 97 million new roles emerge in the job market by the year 2025 but these are positions based on how the new division of labour takes place between humans, machines and algorithms. It is not a surprise that there is a huge demand for engineers, data scientists, AI and automation experts.
The report also notes that 85 million jobs will be displaced in the same time frame. Luckily, there are many existing job roles that can be integrated into these new roles with a little bit of retraining.
The Covid-19 pandemic has definitely accelerated the push towards automation and we are reaching our projections earlier than previously imagined. But what does the future of jobs look like beyond 2025? What kind of skills should we be teaching in schools so that kids are equipped to do roles that have not been invented yet?
The same report shared that the most in-demand skills of the future are a mix of hard and soft skills. It is no longer sufficient to just hardwire a processor but you should also be able to manage your team, think creatively, adapt to new challenges and be able to handle stress.
It may just be the narcissism of our species but it seems that humans are central to all scenarios of the future. Economies and societies will need human beings to progress. So how do we plan our individual futures to align with that of society’s, or rather, how do we all plan our futures in a way that pushes society towards a future we all agree is equitable and peaceful?
This makes the case for subjects that focus on creativity, sociology and other humanities. What makes us unique is not the fact that some of us can work every day for eight hours straight or count how many boxes of cereals a supermarket sold in a month, but it is our creativity. An oil painter did not have to lose his job when cameras were invented, he just had to use his eye for a memorable image using a more efficient tool. He could use the same talent now to create 3D graphics, holograms and more.
The future of jobs forces us to think hard about what really are our talents, where are we the most creative. So, instead of resisting automation and celebrating small victories - such as Walmart giving up on inventory robots, it may be helpful now to figure out where our creative strengths lie as it seems that’s the part of our job that we will manage to keep.
We would love to hear from you about your creative skills and which aspects of your job do you see being automated in the future.
Happy reading and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
If you’d like to delve deeper into the future of jobs, you may enjoy these resources:
…and now what?
So there you go, it’s happening. We will be replaced by machines. Reality is about to trespass the boundaries of fiction and Asimov’s robots are leaving the pages of those epic novels to reach our offices and workspaces.
If you look at the horizon of the World Economic Forum report, it’s tomorrow. 2025 is less than five years around the corner now.
Well, shall we give up then? Of course not! Unlike some people who love to share the #wearethevirus or #humansaretheproblem hashtags on social media, I believe that humans still have the potential. They have a role to play and can find meaning for themselves on the eve of a new age.
In 2025, robots and machines will work as many hours as humans do, meaning that we will have doubled our current workforce and will be sharing our jobs 50:50 with machines. Suffice it to say that this will be a new age.
Despite the stress, anger, despair and all the negative feelings that can come with a new age, there’s still hope that humans are capable of reinventing themselves through the very machines and tools they create: the printing press has opened doors to a never-ending world of ideas and knowledge sharing.
Even more interesting, the development of photographic cameras has freed-up painters from the chains of reality, taking them out of Plato’s cave to create the world as they imagine it, dream it and no longer merely as they see it. This gave us Monet, Kandinsky, Dali, Picasso, people who came to question our sense of reality and dug deeper into our lived experiences.
So I wonder now: what opportunities will robots bring to our amazing brains? What potential will this help us unleash in the coming years?
Knowing how we’ve reacted in the past, let’s not welcome this coming age as a threat or a despair. But let’s learn to work together with machines to let them do what seems boring or unnecessary to us. Let’s work with them to allow for new possibilities to appear.
In this field, I enjoy reading about the concept of co-bots: coworker robots. As the new frontier of inclusivity, we will have to learn to live and collaborate with our new colleagues (dare I call them beings). They will provide us with new perspectives and interactions triggering our creativity in new ways.
This doesn’t mean we have to wait for this time with passivity or naivety about an overly optimistic future. But we need to get ready because it’s coming fast. The printing press took time to spread as well as photography but this wave of automation is much faster.
If you’re a manager or an employer, don’t waste your time wondering about the benefits of broader trainings, or “reskilling”, that may not seem directly relevant to your team’s immediate work. The more you’ll delay, the more your organisation will be impacted in the near future. As individuals, don’t wait too long to work and develop your critical thinking, your ability to think different (here’s a wink to the late Steve Jobs). These are useful skills even right now in these times of conspiracies and deep fakes.
I will take a leap of faith to say we’re about to live in exciting times. It’s our current generations that will make it exciting if they take on their “optimist’s telescope” (to quote Bina Venkataraman). Instead of staying glued to the present, prepare for the future.
You can also read our future writing on robotic farms and training reform unions.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury