Futurist Gerd Leonhard -The Future of Work in the era of Artificial Intelligence with Anton Musgrave

Greetings. I'm Gerd Leonhard Futurist. Anton Musgreff, my colleague, also futurist. This is the world by 2030. Big question about the future is going to be about our work and what kind of jobs we'll have. And many people are worried about artificial intelligence, intelligent machines, cognitive computing, whatever you want to call it, taking our work and replacing us, essentially. And I get requests on this every single day. People worried about jobs being taken away or being automated away. Some people are saying we'll have roughly 300 million jobs replaced. That's the latest research. And so let's talk about what is real about this and what's going to happen with jobs. And you know, as I like to say, if you work like a robot, a robot will take your job. You know, how true is that? And what are we going to do about it? And what does it change for business and society?

For me, Gerd, when I look at the world by 2030, I see one word jumps out at me and that is the word smart. Imagine a world where everything is smart in real time. Cities are smart, systems are smart, autonomous vehicles are smart, humans are smart. And certainly robots will be smart. And so in that politicians. Well, now, let's not push it too far. You know, the impossible we do immediately. The miracles take another three years. Good. But in that context, we need to ask ourselves, what am I adding to the value experience by a customer in some shape or form? So if everything is smart, the systems that I'm engaging with is smart and so forth, what am I? What value am I? What are the levels of insights and impact that I as a human can add to the workflow, if you like. So imagine what are the tools out there that I can use to remove the drudge and the mundane, and then what do I need to do to learn how to operate these skills? Right now, everyone's learning and playing. Well, not everyone, actually. Disturbingly few leaders are playing with GPT as it happens. I spoke to an audience in the Middle east just a few days ago and I said, how many of you have actually played with it? Out of 35 leaders, two had. How many of you have paid for the paid version? Zero. How many of you have integrated an API? Zero. So how do we play with these things to understand their potential and capability and then let them do that and then add another layer of deep human insight and value to the equation? So that's the one side of it. The other, I'm not sure it's particularly helpful, but the research says that 70% of jobs that will exist in five years don't exist today. Now, that's not helpful. It's scary. But that's also positive news. Right? It means we are going to create new opportunities that we didn't think of before or weren't possible before because we were so busy doing the drudge work.

Yeah, I mean, we have this. I think the clear understanding of artificial intelligence is that basically anything that's routine, not requiring human judgment or human understanding, can be done sooner or later by a machine. So language, translation, synchronization in a film, writing content for a blog post, looking up financial information, and of course, call centers and sales and all these things. Basically, routine work will be automated, automated, digitized, automated. And AI will be there to do that. So that's the process of, as you said, I think the next decade, by 2030, will have that. And so if your job is 80% automatable routine, then you're in trouble. If it's going to be 40% routine, then you can say, well, that's good, I get rid of my routine, I move up the food chain. But research shows roughly 300 million jobs are in the routine sector of society. Some more or less. And some of them seem like routine, but they're not actually routine. For example, driving a truck is routine when you're on the highway. But as soon as you get off the highway, you gotta pull up to the shopping mall. No, it's not routine. And you gotta unload the truck. That's not routine. So it's not entirely routine. And it's kind of interesting to see that there's very few jobs who are like totally routine. Like, check out in the supermarket. You could say, okay, there's maybe, I don't know, I think the number is about 10 million people do that there. You can say in many supermarkets, it's total routine because it does not require communication. It's mass things. It's not personal. But many, many, many jobs depend on the checkout to be the personal relationship. And they just go there to have a chat. Exactly.

It's that human interface.

And so it's not entirely routine. So really what's happening, I think is like, if we are successful, we can replace routines, make them faster, like changing your flight commodity work. And then we have to think about how we create new work with the empty space that we have. So if you're a doctor, you're a radiologist, and we've said, I don't think 30 years ago, people said, no more radiologists, because the Robot will read all that stuff and make a recommendation. Turns out not true, because doctors are using the machine to help you and analyze and then they talk to the patient and the result is completely different.

Exactly.

And of course, you can't have a robot telling a patient that they have an evil disease or something. You have to do that in person. So basically what's happening is that these components will help the doctor. The radiologist is to not have to go and look up stuff, but to have instant information, which means the doctor can talk to me and spend more time on personal conversation. It changes the work. So I think the end is, it's probably going to happen that we have a lot of jobs who are becoming essentially useless for humans and we can't compete like call centers. And then we have new ones that happen only because we have these routines automated. In general, I think it will require a lot of smart policy from countries and from governments to figure out how to train people. For example, if the new jobs aren't here yet, we have to train people to invent them. Good.

Let me give you a really practical example. Many years ago, I ran an investment firm managing portfolios for high net worth people. We appointed engineers, accountants, lawyers as wealth managers. And they were highly skilled at interpreting financial statements, investment returns, etc. Drafting wills and trusts and all sorts of things. The most valuable training program we offered them the most impact in the client assessment was a Lifeline training course. Lifeline is an organization that you phone when you're about to jump off a bridge. Right. And the course was so valid because it trained these specialists to listen for the nervousness in the caller's voice when they were about to jump off the bridge. So what are professionals really good at? Remembering stuff and showing others how smart they are. Right. This forced them to press pause and listen with human insight to the urgency to the drama, to the fear in the caller's voice and to talk them down from jumping off the bridge that no machine will ever do. I don't believe that's the one dimension. Those are the areas where we need to reimagine what value is all about in a job, in a process. The other dimension, of course, is who said that we have to keep humans as busy as we always have? There is. There's many experiments running now with four day work weeks. Most of those companies, the research shows, productivity increases, employees are happier, they get less sick, there's lower demands on the national healthcare systems because they're just not as anxious or as stressed before, you know, five day work weeks, 10 hours a day, seven to 10 days leave a year was invented in the height of the industrial age when you couldn't have people work less because machines needed to run. Now they run themselves.

Yeah. I think if we can ever get to the point where we can use the power of machines to help us in the routine work, then eventually maybe we'll get paid to work three hours a day, four days a week for the same money and maybe one day the start of the economy again. In 20 years, we don't work at all, but we still get paid. That's called the basic income. And maybe this concept will eventually become feasible because productivity is so high. The biggest challenge with that is that we've always thought of the more you work, the more money you make. And now it could be I work less and I make more money or I don't work at all and I make some money. So basically, AI brings us to that point, to where we have to think of work as being the end of the goal of our lives.

Well, I think that's the point. We need to reimagine what is valuable. So, again, in the old work, old world, it was all about input and effort. Right. In the new world, valuable is something else. I mean, imagine a young person helping an aged person safely cross the road. She doesn't get injured, so no claim on, again, state medical care. But the system of today doesn't recognise that as valuable. He or she can't monetize that act that was valuable. So how do we reimagine what's valuable? And how do we then reimagine the monetization, if you like, or the reward for doing things that are valuable? In Holland, there's a fantastic experiment where young people get free education, free accommodation, free food on one condition. They live in a facility for old people and one hour a day they need to talk to an older person or read them a story, take them for a walk. What are the economics? Well, it's really simple. The older people have lower health care claims, they're better off. And so the state saves a vast amount of money. That saving is greater than the cost of funding education, food and accommodation. So it's still a capitalist, if you like, model. But we've reimagined how the system works and how we recognize value, et cetera. And I think that's going to tie into this conversation about what constitutes a job. Maybe job is the wrong word. What constitutes impact.

Well, we kind of already had that shaping up in many ways, because people are Working in the cloud a lot more. And the new jobs haven't been invented yet. Like social media, for example. 21 million jobs didn't exist 10 years ago.

Well, the newest job.

Good.

Is a prompt engineer.

That's right, the prompting person. And so these new jobs are also. There's just a different nature of what it entails and how we can do it. So the real question is maybe in 10 years we get to the point to where work is no longer the central story of our lives. Like in our lives, in our generation, work is what you do, basically pretty much it.

And work gave you a sense of self worth.

And now that's shifting. Maybe AI will force us to go into that shift of defining what the purpose of life is rather than working, and how we get that money that's being generated to be distributed to everybody so we can make that shift and work and not force everybody to work even more. So far, technology has not fulfilled the promise of actually us working less. So in social media, we thought we work less. Not true, Covid. We stay at home, work less. Also not true. But now maybe with AI, we can finally get to that point if we have the wisdom of government and the right decisions to actually make that happen.

Well, I think it leads us into a conversation. What is humanity all about? What is our dream for humankind in the future? And I think that's maybe a theme for another show. GERD is what are we actually aiming all of this debate at at the end of the day, as humans, as workers?

Well, you can find all of the answers@theworldby2030.com not all of them, but some of them. Thanks very much for tuning in.

Thank you, Sam.